There's Nothing Wrong with Rev. Wright

By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet. Posted March 25, 2008.

Good thing for Martin Luther King admirers -- blogs, talk radio, and 24/7 cable news "analysis" weren't around in the Sixties.

King might not have the status of patron saint in the temple of American civil religion. Then again, King is safely dead. While America may be the land of "second-chances," its people are definitely not the type to give props to a prophet while he or she is alive.

In criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam, King said America was "one of the main purveyors of violence" in the world. Imagine King, with his sing-song black preacher cadence, saying that over and over and over again on CNN.

Longtime readers of this column might say this is typical Sean Gonsalves fare. And it's true. So, let me explain just how typical I am.

I'm just a typical American who happens to be black, and no matter what Limbaugh says about Barack's grandma, there's a difference between typical and stereotypical.

Like most typical black people my age, from the time I was a little boy, through high school, right up until early adulthood, I spent a lot of time in the black Baptist Church. Tuesday night prayer meetings. Wednesday night bible study. And Sunday service.

It's "typical" because something like 90 percent of all African-Americans are nominally-affiliated believers. And that's why I can say with certainty that no black person in America was shocked to hear Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "controversial" preaching and are probably more shocked at the hysterical and hypocritical manufactured controversy surrounding Wright.

I know we're in the new PC era of "colorblindness," where the word "racist" has been flipped on its head by the fading neo-right to mean: any public talk about race, without doing the Bill Cosby/Thomas Sowell routine, is "racist."

People are free to think whatever they want but just so we're clear: a racist, by definition, is someone who explicitly or implicitly believes one racial group is morally and intellectually superior to others. Only in a warped world is it considered "racist" to talk publicly about the legacy of white supremacy.

So let me tell you 'bout my typical black mother. She's a church-going woman and she made sure my younger brother and I were church-going kids. No if, and, or she would whoop our butts. And not just church. My mother was a big fan of Sunday school too.

Boredom and longing to watch the 49ers or Raiders on TV aside, my Sunday school teachers sparked in me a deep and abiding interest in studying the bible (King James Version).

As a child of extreme energy and passion, I was drawn to the books of the Prophets (Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah etc.) -- at first because it was fun to see my Sunday school teachers squirm when asked a hard question about, say, Elijah murdering hundreds Baalists, after he already proved his point. You'd think the fire would have be enough to settle the Who's-God-is-Real contest but nope -- Elijah just had to put the sword to every non-believer in sight.

It wasn't until I began seriously studying the prophetic tradition that I came across the work of the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel. First, Heschel taught me what a prophet is not: "A prophet is neither a messenger, an oracle, a seer, nor an ecstatic," but "a witness to the divine pathos, one who bears testimony to God's concern for human beings."

Reading the prophet's words, "one cannot long retain the security of a prudent, impartial observer. The prophets do not offer reflections about ideas in general. Their words are onslaughts, scuttling illusions of false security, challenging evasions, calling faith to account, questioning prudence and impartiality."

As any black church-goer will tell you, prophetic preaching is the communal lifeblood of black religious experience in America. Always has been. Rev. Jeremiah Wright comes out of that experience -- an experience I personally encountered the Sunday I attended Oakland's Allen Temple.

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Sean Gonsalves is a syndicated columnist and news editor with the Cape Cod Times.

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