Education, Careers & Professional News
The Education of Jeremiah Wright
Editor’s Note: Whether Wright’s statements were taken out of context, deliberately mangled and twisted, and packaged to make him look bad is irrelevant. Wright’s words were sensational and shocking news sound bites.
The much discussed, much defended, and much reviled pastor Jeremiah Wright can’t be blamed for his gross naiveté on politics. After all, he’s a preacher, and as he told Bill Moyers in an interview on PBS, he only talks “about the things of God.” That’s the way it should be for men of the faith.
But that’s not the way it is when one of your flock is a politician who’s at the top of the heap in the dash for the White House. It doesn’t do much good as countless Wright defenders have shouted that he is being held to the old racial double standard when much of the media and the public dump on him and call him a racist, hatemonger, and anti-American for his racially inflammatory remarks, but do not pound on white preachers who rail against abortion, gay marriage, and make borderline gender and racially offensive statements. The issue in that case is not the color of the preacher or the notoriety of the member of the flock that hears the preacher’s message; it’s the timing of the message.
Whether Wright’s statements were taken out of context, deliberately mangled and twisted, and packaged to make him look bad is irrelevant. In fact, his remarks weren’t even blown up necessarily to make Obama look like a closet radical and racial panderer. Wright’s words in context or not were sensational, shocking, and made-in-heaven news sound bites. Since Obama is a member of his church flock that made them ripe for a political spin.
But Wright should have known that. He’s no babe in the wood when it comes to controversy. Sooner or later his words would be fodder for a YouTube loop and for a media whose antenna is sky high for even the slightest bit of campaign titillation. There were just too many hints of that. The early rap of his Southside Chicago church, his fiery preaching style, and his outspoken Afro-centric activism on racial and social issues were plums for the news and political pickings. Early on in the Obama campaign Wright purportedly warned him that his church membership might eventually be made an issue.
He even wrote a letter to a New York Times writer lambasting her for allegedly doing a hatchet job on the church and his preachments a year before the storm broke. His oblique dig at Obama in the Moyers interview for as he put it doing what politicians do showed he knew something about the penchant of politicians to do and say anything to win.
Presumably what Wright meant in Obama’s case was that he had to do racial damage control and distance himself from his views.
Wright also learned that in politics timing is everything. The quotes that he screams were skewed and taken out of context are from older sermons and talks. There was no need to make an issue of them then because Obama was still an unknown on the national scene.
Even after he tossed his hat in the presidential ring in February 2007, it still took many months of debates, hard campaigning, and then spectacular wins in a slew of Democratic primaries and caucuses before Democratic Party top guns, much of the media, and public – and that included the majority of blacks, not to mention the GOP watchdogs – really believed that he had a real shot at the presidency. There was simply no need to fasten Wright as a political albatross around Obama’s neck at that point.