Pastor Wright: In Context

Racism is still alive in America. Few would claim that racial prejudice against African-Americans, an enduring American shame, has been eliminated. Yet the explosion of criticism, mainly by white commentators, of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and of Senator Barack Obama for remaining his parishioner and friend, conveniently ignores the world of white racism in which Wright developed his ideas.

The focus on Wright and Obama has obscured the larger truth about the sermons he has presented: they resonated in the African-American community. Few of the self-righteous critics of Wright appear to care that they are also stamping a significant proportion of African-Americans as “appalling” (Cheney) or “anti-American” (Bill O’Reilly).

Let’s begin with Wright’s claim that the AIDS epidemic has been deliberately spread in the African-American population by the government. The use of African-Americans by government-sponsored researchers in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and in other similar examples of racist science, continued well into the 1960s. Wright’s claim about AIDS and the government, while both preposterous and without evidence, can be compared to other claims about government conspiracies against our national health.

In my own youth, conservatives routinely accused governments of poisoning America with fluoridation programs, occasionally bringing up the specter of communist plots. In my local newspaper, parents’ groups have recently raised the alarm about mercury in government-mandated vaccinations, with the more extreme voices claiming conspiracies. Plenty of Republicans of Wright’s age came to political maturity attacking the American government as full of spies and traitors, and some popular conservative voices, like Ann Coulter, are trying to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy and his anti-American form of patriotism. All these conspiracy theories are based in paranoia and misinformation, with this important exception: Wright knew that his government had secretly abused the health of African-Americans in the recent past.

African-American suspicion of white society and the American government is much broader than this myth about AIDS. Many African-Americans believe in what they call simply “The Plan,” an organized process of pushing poor African-Americans out of their urban neighborhoods to make way for profitable gentrification. This belief is not so much based on broad evidence as on interpreting a variety of local conflicts in the light of the long history of racism in the official treatment of African-Americans, such as racial profiling in law enforcement and the deliberate placement of highways, garbage treatment plants and other anti-social constructions in minority neighborhoods.

Certainly developers, real estate agents, and contractors are working together in many places to make money by gentrifying low-income city districts. The inevitable result is that African-American and other minorities will move out and whites will move in, the reversal of late 20th-century urban white flight. Because I read every day in my local newspaper about the corrupt process of awarding bids for building major projects in Illinois, it would not be too hard for me to believe that some or many local or state governments are in cahoots with moneyed interests to help them build or destroy wherever they want. I don’t even have to believe in an anti-black conspiracy.

As Wright was growing up, thousands of American towns and cities outside of the South would not allow African-Americans to remain after sunset, the so-called sundown towns. James W. Loewen has shown that hundreds of municipalities in Illinois remained all-white until the civil rights movement cast a harsh light on the unspoken practices of racism, North and South. Sundown towns represented racist government at the local level, tolerated by state and federal governments, although these rules were clearly unconstitutional.

I do not defend Wright’s assumption that the American government in the 21st century continues such racist practices. His claims from the pulpit are mistaken and inflammatory. They will not reduce racism but entrench it among whites and obscure from his listeners the real gains made over the past 40 years. But “un-American”? The pervasive racism that embittered and blinded Wright was un-American. His criticisms of America, not any harsher or more outrageous than those made by conservatives since World War II, need to be heard, not as the ranting of a crackpot, but as an expression of African-American feelings about white America.

Two best-selling novels have made me think again about what the daily public experience of violent American racism has meant to average people. Both Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs and Walter Mosley’s Cinnamon Kiss place the description of white racism in the 1950s and 1960s at the center of their narratives. Their plots are fiction, but the experiences were real for millions of African-Americans.

Barack Obama would be a different kind of President. He does not have to feel others’ pain. He has felt the lash of racism on his body his whole life, just as Jeremiah Wright has for decades longer. Unlike Wright, Obama seeks to heal rather than to condemn, as his historic speech in Philadelphia shows. That work can make all of us white Americans uncomfortable, whether or not we feel any personal responsibility for racism, past or present. Hoping to avoid once more a reckoning with America’s fundamental problems, conservatives are using Wright’s sermons as a pretext to attack Obama. And racism lives on.