Showing posts with label Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.. Show all posts

May 22, 2012

Hey, who lives in Tinley Park?

I keep reading about this incident in a Tinley Park, IL restaurant, in which a bunch of leftist white thugs armed with hammers attacked a small group of diners who say they are part of a "European Heritage" organization. But I keep getting distracted by the thought that I've heard of Tinley Park not that long ago. Who lives in Tinley Park who used to be in the news? 

Oh, yeah, Mr. Officially Not News. The Rev. He Who Must Never Be Mentioned Again lives in a 10,000 square foot house he built in 2008 in a golf course development in Tinley Park. 

Speaking of the man whom all right-thinking folks recently decided must never be spoken of in polite society, former New York Times Magazine chief editor Edward Klein says that the Unmentionable Personage was offered $150,000 hush money by Dr. Eric Whitaker, one of Barack and Michelle Obama's four closest friends. 

As I blogged on April 29, 2008, when The Occluded One had returned from his cruise and derided the honesty of Obama's mellifluous race speech of March 18:
One little-mentioned aspect of Barack Obama's on-going fiasco involving his spiritual mentor is that it makes him look feckless. 
Rev. Wright has been a problem Obama knew he was going to have for, roughly, ever. But what has he done about it, besides giving a 5,000 word speech? Did he switch to a Washington D.C. church when he was elected to the Senate in 2005? Did he persuade Trinity to stop selling Wright's sermons on DVD? Did he provide any sort of narrative about the evolving ideological differences between the young and mature Barack Obamas? 
In contrast, do you remember how in February 2004, Democratic frontrunner John Kerry was rocked by rumors that he was having an adulterous affair with a young woman? You probably don't remember because, although for about a day it looked like it might derail Kerry's victory march through the primaries, the story quickly went away -- when the young lady went away, leaving the country. 
Problem dealt with. 
I have no idea if the rumors about Kerry were true or if the girl's timely departure from America was a coincidence or what. But, let's assume the worst about Kerry: he wrote a big check from the allowance his wife gives him to his mistress in return for making herself scarce. What can you then say about Kerry? 
Well, one thing you can say is that he had a problem and he dealt with it. All else being equal, I'd rather have a President who had a problem and dealt with it than a President who had a problem and failed to deal with it. 
Wright should not have been an unsolvable problem for Obama. Wright likes the spotlight, but he also likes other things. (He drives a Porsche, for example). 
So, Wright likes money. Obama has friends with money. Right there, you have the makings of a deal. (The payoff didn't have to be crass -- just that in return for Wright maintaining a low profile all year, in December 2008 Obama's supporters would start up a charitable foundation for Rev. to run. Obama could have asked Bill and Hill for advice on the fine points of foundations.)

Then, in August 2008, New York magazine reported that Rev. Wright was going to publish a book in October 2008 (as I had predicted on April 2, 2008). Big Trouble.

But, quickly, that news was denied. As I blogged at the time:
Update: Now, Rev. Dr. Wright's daughter says that isn't true. She asserts her father is in an electronically inaccessible region of Ghana and will issue a statement when he emerges from "email hell." 
I must say, the news that Rev. Wright is currently hanging out with Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Kurtz makes Obama look much more Presidential than did the endless Obama-Wright psychodrama of last spring. 

July 21, 2010

Muffling discussion of Rev. Wright

From the Daily Caller, an interesting account of how press coverage is shaped by partisanship, rage, and behind-the-scenes threats of ostracism:
It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”...
Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote....

The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones rejected an early draft, saying, “I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of [Gibson's] and [Stephanopoulos’s] questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input.” [I bet they do!]

Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist when Obama took office, helped, too. The letter should be “Short, punchy and solely focused on vapidity of gotcha,” Bernstein wrote.

In the midst of this collaborative enterprise, Holly Yeager, now of the Columbia Journalism Review, dropped into the conversation to say “be sure to read” a column in that day’s Washington Post that attacked the debate.

Columnist Joe Conason weighed in with suggestions. So did Slate contributor David Greenberg, and David Roberts of the website Grist. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, helped too.

Journolist members signed the statement and released it April 18, calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”

The letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York Times. But only a week later, Obama – and the journalists who were helping him – were on the defensive once again.

Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.

It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list. [Emphasis mine.]

The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”

Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”...

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

...“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.” Ackerman went on:
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Ackerman did allow there were some Republicans who weren’t racists. “We’ll know who doesn’t deserve this treatment — Ross Douthat, for instance — but the others need to get it.”

He also said he had begun to implement his plan. “I previewed it a bit on my blog last week after Commentary wildly distorted a comment Joe Cirincione made to make him appear like (what else) an antisemite. So I said: why is it that so many on the right have such a problem with the first viable prospective African-American president?”

Several members of the list disagreed with Ackerman – but only on strategic grounds.

... Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”

But it was Ackerman who had the last word. “Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”

The basic question in electoral campaigns is: "Whose side are you on?" Candidate Obama had repeatedly boasted that he was on Rev. Wright's side. Rev. Wright had spent a long career making clear whose side he was on, such as holding a gala at the Chicago Hyatt Regency in November 2007 to give his personal Lifetime Achievement Award to the Hon. Louis Farrakhan.
This kind of thing was kept largely on the down-low (although it was readily apparent to anybody with Internet access who wanted to find out) by concerted efforts of the press until after 42 out of 50 states had voted in the primaries, when finally videotapes of Rev. Wright got on-line. Obama then gave an eloquent speech full of half-truths and outright lies, which the press triumphantly accepted. Eventually Wright got back from his ocean cruise and in April Wright pointed out that Obama had lied in order to become President. That caused a brief flurry, but Obama lied some more, and the press and John McCain accepted it.
End of story

April 11, 2010

"The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama"

An excerpt from my new VDARE.com column:

Barack Obama is the most powerful man in America. And David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is one of the most powerful figures in American journalism.

Not surprisingly, reviewers of Remnick’s new Presidential biography/doorstop, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, have generally prostrated themselves before Remnick with the same shamelessness as the editor has prostrated himself before the politician in these 656 pages of humorless hagiography.

A biography of Santa Claus would be more hard-hitting than The Bridge, which confirms in exhaustive detail that, yes, Obama's life is, indeed, "a story of race and inheritance." Remnick, who is certainly a bright fellow, just makes himself seem obtuse as he constantly offers the most insipid rationalizations available of the outsized role that race has played in Obama’s choices. Political correctness makes you stupid.

The Bridge stands as a self-emasculated monument to the insidious costs of Access Journalism. Yes, Remnick scored a lot of interviews. The Bridge, for examples, ends with Remnick reverently interviewing his subject in the Oval Office about the meaning of his being in the Oval Office.

Yet, for what shall it profit a writer, if he shall gain the whole world of access, and lose his own soul?

When you could speak truth to power, what does it say about you that you choose to speak spin for power? ...

Despite Obama’s hopeless struggle with being black enough relative to other black politicians, he was a natural at exploiting white people’s vast reservoir of good will toward blacks—and desire to feel superior over other whites—for his own personal advancement. He was the one they’d been waiting for. As Eric Zorn, the liberal Chicago Tribune columnist, said about Obama’s campaigning among whites in 2004:
“Obama was somehow all about validating you. … He was radiating the sense that ‘You’re the kind of guy who can accept a black guy as a senator.’ He made people feel better about themselves for liking him.”

Read the whole thing.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 11, 2009

Speaking of Rev. Wright ...

From the Norfolk Daily News:
In an exclusive interview at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference, Wright told the Daily Press that he has not spoken to his former church member since Obama became president, and he implied that the White House won't allow Obama to talk to him.

"Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me," Wright said. "I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office. ...

This, of course, has caused a bigger controversy than Wright writing in December 2007 about Italians' having "garlic-noses" and calling Jesus's Crucifixion "a public lynching Italian style."

(To Wright, the Bible, and almost everything else, is just Chicago ethnic politics writ large.)

Wright goes on to say:
"They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. ... I said from the beginning: He's a politician; I'm a pastor. He's got to do what politicians do."

Wright also said Obama should have sent a U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Racism held recently in Geneva, Switzerland, but that the president did not for fear of offending Jews and Israel. He specifically cited the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

"Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing (by) the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don't want Barack talking like that because that's anti-Israel," Wright said. ...

In the interview after a nighttime sermon Tuesday at the ministers conference, Wright offered that he has no regrets over the controversy that resulted in a severed relationship with Obama, a former member of the Chicago church of which Wright was the longtime pastor.

"Regret for what ... that the media went back five, seven, 10 years and spent $4,000 buying 20 years worth of sermons to hear what I've been preaching for 20 years?

"Regret for preaching like I've been preaching for 50 years? Absolutely none."

Wright said that when he went to the polls, he did not hold any grudge against Obama.

"Of course I voted for him — he's my son. I'm proud of him," Wright said. "I've got five biological kids. They all make mistakes and bad choices. I haven't stopped loving any of them.

"He made mistakes. He made bad choices. I've got kids who listen to their friends. He listened to those around him. I did not disown him."

According to their 2005-2007 tax returns, Senator and Mrs. Obama donated $53,770 to Rev. Wright's church after his election to the U.S. Senate.

From America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's Story of Race and Inheritance:"

It’s sometimes argued in Obama’s defense that, while this kind of thing sounds crazy-left to white people, it’s actually merely on the left half of the mainstream among blacks. For example, Jodi Kantor wrote in the New York Times in 2007, “Mr. Wright‘s church, the 8,000-member Trinity United Church of Christ, is considered mainstream—Oprah Winfrey has attended services, and many members are prominent black professionals. But the church is also more Afrocentric and politically active than standard black congregations.”

Oprah, however, quit. As Allison Samuels reported in Newsweek:

[Oprah] Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright‘s more incendiary sermons …


Unlike Obama, Oprah could quit because she’s black enough. Newsweek goes on:

Friends of Sen. Barack Obama, whose relationship with Wright has rocked his bid for the White House, insist that it would be unfair to compare Winfrey’s decision to leave Trinity United with his own decision to stay. “[His] reasons for attending Trinity were totally different,” said one campaign adviser, who declined to be named discussing the Illinois senator’s sentiments. “Early on, he was in search of his identity as an African-American and, more importantly, as an African-American man. Reverend Wright and other male members of the church were instrumental in helping him understand the black experience in America. Winfrey wasn’t going for that. She’s secure in her blackness, so that didn’t have a hold on her.”

Conversely, according to Obama’s campaign adviser’s logic, Obama is insecure in his blackness so he couldn’t quit.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 14, 2008

Best. Election. Ever.

The New York Post has reported that the 67-year-old Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s 2007 affair with a 37-year-old church lady employed by a black Texas megachurch headed by one of Wright's proteges has led to her divorce and firing. (And, yes, she's not black.)

Payne's husband, Fred Payne, 64, said he learned of the affair in late February, when he discovered e-mails between his wife and Wright. "There must have been about 80 of them, back and forth," he said. "Wright said things like he was going to leave his wife for Elizabeth."

Wright has been married to his second wife, Ramah, for more than 20 years. The preacher reportedly wooed Ramah away from her first husband in the 1980s, when the couple came to marriage counseling at Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

After discovering he had been cuckolded, Fred Payne, who had married Elizabeth in October 2006, headed straight for divorce court. "I was downright mad about this bull- - - -," said Fred, who said he is "in the oil and gas business," belongs to a hunting club and makes his own bullets in his garage.

"People wouldn't be happy to know that my wife was sleeping with a black man." He added, "Rev. Haynes doesn't like the interracial thing, either. This was quite an issue for him." [Rev. Haynes is black.]

Elizabeth Payne said she has been banished by Haynes and the flock at Friendship-West. "I'm not a member of the congregation anymore; I'm not even allowed on the premises," she said.

Ms. Payne has filed a charge of wrongful dismissal.

That big house being built for Sen. Obama's long-time spiritual adviser in an almost all-white gated golf course community is owned by Trinity United Church of Christ. I assumed at the time that there was some tax-avoidance reason for this, but perhaps when Wright made these arrangements, he had community property issues in mind, too.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 8, 2008

Was Rev. Wright mentioned during Republican convention?

Question: How many speakers at the Republican convention last week mentioned Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.?

I did text searches on the speeches by McCain, Palin, Giuliani, Lieberman, Romney, and Steele (the main black speaker) and didn't find any mentions of "Wright," "pastor," "minister," "church," or "Trinity."

As a commenter suggested, you might think that keynote speaker Rudy Giuliani could have had some fun with Wright's comment, as reported by Newsday last March:

From the Wright-written eulogy for scholar Asa Hilliard in the Dec. 2007 edition of the Trumpet magazine [published by Wright's daughter]: "(Jesus') enemies had their opinion about Him... The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans."

After calling Jesus's crucifixion "a public lynching Italian style" executed in "Apartheid Rome," he goes on to claim that white supremacists run the U.S. government:

"The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge ..."

Senator Obama gave $53,000 to Rev. Wright's church in 2005-2007.

But, no, all is forgiven and forgotten, apparently ...

The only mention in the press of this curious absence of Rev. Wright's name from the GOP convention I could find was a Madison, WI religion columnist who noted:

"I was fascinated during the Republican convention this past week that for all the attacks on Obama, the furor from last spring over Jeremiah Wright seemed to have been taken off the table. I imagine that was done in part because of the racial subtext of that furor ..."

And exactly how much credit are the Republicans getting for their forebearance in not going after the juiciest target? Zero. They are being denounced for making a joke about community organizers!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 12, 2008

UPDATED: You heard it here first

From New York magazine (via NRO):

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As I blogged here on April 2:

So, I don't expect we've heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he's going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he's going to do about it.

He'll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won't take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn't you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright's memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don't think we've heard the last from Rev. Wright.

Update: Now, Rev. Dr. Wright's daughter says that isn't true. She asserts her father is in an electronically inaccessible region of Ghana and will issue a statement when emerges from "email hell."

I must say, the news Rev. Wright is currently hanging out with Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Kurtz makes Obama look much more Presidential than did the endless Obama-Wright psychodrama of last spring. As I blogged on April 29:

One little-mentioned aspect of Barack Obama's on-going fiasco involving his spiritual mentor is that it makes him look feckless.

Rev. Wright has been a problem Obama knew he was going to have for, roughly, ever. But what has he done about it, besides giving a 5,000 word speech? Did he switch to a Washington D.C. church when he was elected to the Senate in 2005? Did he persuade Trinity to stop selling Wright's sermons on DVD? Did he provide any sort of narrative about the evolving ideological differences between the young and mature Barack Obamas?

In contrast, do you remember how in February 2004, Democratic frontrunner John Kerry was rocked by rumors that he was having an adulterous affair with a young woman? You probably don't remember because, although for about a day it looked like it might derail Kerry's victory march through the primaries, the story quickly went away -- when the young lady went away, leaving the country.

Problem dealt with.

I have no idea if the rumors about Kerry were true or if the girl's timely departure from America was a coincidence or what. But, let's assume the worst about Kerry: he wrote a big check from the allowance his wife gives him to his mistress in return for making herself scarce. What can you then say about Kerry?

Well, one thing you can say is that he had a problem and he dealt with it. All else being equal, I'd rather have a President who had a problem and dealt with it than a President who had a problem and failed to deal with it.

Wright should not have been an unsolvable problem for Obama. Wright likes the spotlight, but he also likes other things. (He drives a Porsche, for example).

So, Wright likes money. Obama has friends with money. Right there, you have the makings of a deal. (The payoff didn't have to be crass -- just that in return for Wright maintaining a low profile all year, in December 2008 Obama's supporters would start up a charitable foundation for Rev. to run. Obama could have asked Bill and Hill for advice on the fine points of foundations.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 31, 2008

Obama quits Trinity United Church of Christ

The AP reports:

Barack Obama said Saturday he has resigned his 20-year membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago "with some sadness" in the aftermath of inflammatory remarks by his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and more recent fiery remarks at the church by a visiting priest. ...

"This was one I didn't see coming," Obama said Saturday when he [was] asked if he had anticipated the firestorm that would erupt over his relationship with Wright.

Huh? "This was one I didn't see coming?" What kind of would-be President of the United States wouldn't see this one coming? Heck, I saw it coming for him in March 2007.

Of course, the latest Trinity brouhaha doesn't directly concern Wright, it involves a well-known far leftist Catholic priest, Michael Pfleger, who was invited to preach at Trinity by Wright's successor Otis Moss III. A month ago, Obama said of Moss, “Well, the new pastor, the young pastor, Reverend Otis Moss, is a wonderful young pastor.”

As I've said, Obama is running a Karl Rove style campaign designed to do the absolute minimum to get him 51% of the Democratic vote and 51% of the general election vote.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 15, 2008

A black Obama cynic explains

Cinque Henderson writes in The New Republic:

Ninety percent of black Democrats support Barack Obama. So that might leave an observer wondering: What the hell is up with that other 10 percent? Are they stupid? Do they hate their own race? Do they not understand the historical import of the moment?

I can shed some insight on this demographic anomaly. In gatherings of black people, I'm invariably the only one for the Dragon Lady...

I disliked Obama almost instantly. I never believed the central premises of his autobiography or his campaign. He is fueled by precisely the same brand of personal ambition as Bill Clinton. But, where Clinton is damned as "Slick Willie," Obama is hailed as a post-racial Messiah. Do I believe that Obama had this whole yes-we-can deal planned from age 16? No, I would respond. He began plotting it at age 22. This predisposition, of course, doesn't help me in making the case against Obama, especially not with black people. But, believe me, there's a strong case to be made that he isn't such a virtuous mediator of race. And it's this skepticism about Obama's racial posturing that has led us, the 10 percent, into dissent. ...

But, once you stare past the radiant glow surrounding Obama and begin to study the exact reasons for his so-called racial transcendence, you can't help but conclude that it is mostly hokum. Why do black people love Obama? In large part, it's because of the dark-skinned woman on his arm. Black people (especially black women) are nuts for Michelle. Had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would've never gotten off the ground with black people. And would whites really be so into him if he hadn't had a white mother? Based on U.S. political history, you would have to conclude: not a chance. My suspicion is that people are ultimately comfortable with Obama because a member of his family looks like them--and, if you think about it, that's not terribly transcendent.

It's also not terribly true -- Obama wants you to believe that, but his life story suggests that he'd be more moderate about race if he was black on both sides and thus didn't have to keep proving he's black enough. (Something similar is true for the Bob Bar-lookalike Rev. Wright.)

This is really not a complicated concept to grasp about the frontrunner for the Presidency, but since we've all been indoctrinated to be childishly simple-minded about race, very few get it.

It is Obama's biography, we are told, that will govern his behavior. He was raised by a mother who supposedly didn't see color, so he doesn't see color. He was born into tolerance and multi-racial understanding, so he will practice tolerance and multi-racial understanding. Except, that is, when it's not useful to him.

Which brings me to South Carolina, where I was born and raised. I was there before and during the primary. Recall the moment. Obama was gaining on Clinton--but had also just lost New Hampshire and Nevada. A loss in South Carolina, and he would have been done for.

It's worth remembering that the majority of blacks still think O.J. Simpson is innocent. And, in times like these, when a black man is out front in the public eye, black people feel both proud and vulnerable and, as a result, scour the earth for evidence of racists plotting to bring him down, like an advance team ready to sound an alarm. Barack needed only a gesture, a quick sneer or nod in the direction of the Clintons' hidden racism to avail himself of the twisted love that rescued O.J. and others like him and to smooth his path to victory, and, therefore, to salvage his candidacy. After Donna Brazile and James Clyburn started to cry racism, Barack was repeatedly asked his thoughts. He declined to answer, allowing the charge to grow for days (in sharp contrast to how he leapt to Joe Biden's defense a month earlier). But, while he remained silent about the allegations of racism, he gave speeches across South Carolina that warned against being "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled" by the Clintons. His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin. ...

As the son of a Baptist minister, I can attest that Wright is and was an extreme aberration from how the overwhelming majority of black Christians worship. In church, black people hear about Peter, Paul, Mary, and how to get into heaven. How to forgive. How to love. Not how to vote.

Well ... you don't have to fully believe that to realize that Rev. Wright is to the left of the black church mainstream.

But here was Barack suggesting that Wright's behavior was commonplace in black churches: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." He generalized Wright's ridiculousness to distract from his individual choice to worship under a buffoon for two decades. I have a cousin who attended Wright's church for three weeks and then left, never to return. She had no interest in hearing his nonsense from the pulpit.

Barack obscured the true nature of black religious life because, to do otherwise, he would have had to answer the question, "Why are you a member of a church that is this racially divisive and such a sharp aberration to how the rest of black people worship?" When Barack beautifully suggested that the beliefs pronounced from the pulpit of Trinity in Chicago are not uncommon, he was feeding us garbage. But Barack needed to protect his reputation as a race-healer and unifier, so he told a lie about black religious life to help keep the glow of his own reputation alive. And now the evidence suggests that Barack didn't, in the end, break with Wright over his outrageous racial claims, but over his suggestion that Barack is just a politician.

That so many people have a stake in ignoring these real concerns is troubling. At least the Hillary supporters I know seem to be aware of her more unsavory traits: that she carries a knife with her that she could pull out at any minute. Not so with Obama's fans. It's nearly impossible to get them to admit any wrong in him. Given the choice, I prefer to side with the group that knows their candidate can be a jerk, rather than the group that believes their candidate is Jesus.

Cinque Henderson is a TV writer, working on a book about Abraham Lincoln.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 12, 2008

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. to run for Libertarian nomination for President

Oh, sorry, my mistake -- that's not Rev. Wright, that's former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) who wants the Libertarian nomination.

Back during the Clinton impeachment, when blacks loved the Clintons and hated Barr for helping get Bill impeached, black radio talk shows would be flooded with calls saying things like, "Barr is passing. My cousin told me he's his cousin's cousin." And if that's not proof, I don't know what is.

Barr must be kicking himself now over the fact that he didn't hop on this whole mixed race = racial reconciliator shtick decades ago instead of just positioning himself as another boring white guy.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 10, 2008

Barack Obama as Eric Hebborn

An excerpt from my new American Conservative article:

How did such a smooth operator as Barack Obama mishandle so ineptly the roadblock that he had to know stood between him and the White House: his intimate two-decade relationship with his far leftist minister, the erudite and articulate Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.? And what, if anything, can he do to repair the damage?

As I asked more than a year ago in VDARE.com, "Why has Obama tied his fate to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a tactless race man who is the living opposite of the myth Obama is trying to project about himself?"

Obama's candidacy is based on encouraging white voters to assume naively that his mixed race ancestry means that he is somehow genetically programmed for racial and political moderation. Indeed, in his long-postponed denunciation of Wright on April 29th, the reeling Obama made explicit the amusingly eugenic thinking implicit in Obamamania:

"That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings."

This kind of fantasizing about Obama was embarrassingly widespread before television finally began paying attention to Wright in March. For example, back on December 30, 2007, conservative columnist George Will enthused about how he can just tell that Obama must share Will's views on race:

"Obama seems to understand America's race fatigue, the unbearable boredom occasioned by today's stale politics generally and by the perfunctory theatrics of race especially…The political implications of this transcendence of confining categories are many, profound and encouraging."

Yet, if I could see from reading pp. 274-295 in Obama's 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance that Obama's spiritual mentor would be campaign trouble, why couldn't Obama? You might think that such a cool-headed vivisectionist of other people's political and racial fantasies would have guessed that his surrogate father-figure wouldn't let him get away with misleading the public about the ideological comradeship that led Obama to Wright in the 1980s. Unfortunately, Obama's self-pity keeps him from being as cold-eyed an analyst of himself as he is of others.

Normally, Obama is to the average politician as the great art forger Eric Hebborn was to the run-of-the-mill counterfeiter. Hebborn tried to follow a moral code of his own devising. On 17th Century paper, he would sketch in the style of, say, Rembrandt, but he would not forge Rembrandt's signature. Hebborn's view was that if Sotheby's was foolish and greedy enough to talk themselves into hoping that they were buying a Rembrandt drawing, well, that was their fault, not his.

Similarly, Obama prefers to mislead without lying outright. He likes to obscure the truth under so many thoughtful nuances, dependent clauses, Proustian details, lawyerly evasions, and eloquent summarizations of his opponents' arguments that his audiences ultimately just make up little fantasies about how he must agree with them. Rather like Hebborn, Obama seems to feel that he's not to blame if the press and public want to be fooled.

Sadly, though, Obama has lied repeatedly, and artlessly, about Wright's Youtube sermons, asserting that he had never heard such things and they were being taken out of context. The day after Wright's National Press Club barnburner on April 28 exploded these excuses, Obama pathetically claimed, "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago." ...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 5, 2008

The Hitch on Michelle Obama

In Slate:

Are We Getting Two for One? Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?

By Christopher Hitchens

I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette.

Why? Obama wrote thousands of sympathetic words about Wright's views and style in 1995. If he has changed his mind since then (and in 2004 he said he hadn't), it's his responsibility to prove it to us.

And Obama wrote a couple of pages that were fairly sympathetic to Farrakhan, rejecting his black nationalism on practical, not moral grounds.

On p. 200 of his autobiography, Obama writes:
"If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence."

If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq [a Black Muslim ally].

After a discussion of the failure of the Nation of Islam's attempts to sell black-only toothpaste and other consumer products, Obama rejects Farrakhanism as being unable to "create a strong and effective insularity."

Hitchens goes on:

All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University…

A friend asked an old Chicago acquaintance of Obama about Wright a few months ago, and he blamed it on Michelle, but didn't cite any persuasive evidence.

I spent a few hours last week looking for evidence to support this not prima facie implausible presumption, but couldn't find anything in particular on Google. We know that Obama met Jeremiah Wright before he met Michelle Robinson. I've never heard that she was a member of Wright's church when she met Obama in 1989.

The idea that Michelle would knowingly risk becoming First Lady out of personal, ideological, or racial loyalty to Rev. Wright seems less likely the more you think about it. My guess would be that Michelle would strangle baby pandas to get to the White House. She has a need for social dominance, which was unfulfilled in her educational career at intellectually elite schools that she got into because of affirmative action. In contrast, nobody cares if the First Lady isn't all that smart -- she's the First Lady so she's the highest ranking woman at any social gathering.

On the other hand, I haven't seen any evidence that Michelle gave her husband any good advice on his Rev. Wright problem either. (I'm not sure that "giving good advice" is Michelle's strong suit.) There is so much we don't understand about them.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 4, 2008

Why Oprah left Wright: Because she's black enough

I've always guessed that Barack Obama has spent a lot of time studying Oprah Winfrey's success. But, they are very different in important ways.

Allison Samuels reports in Newsweek:

[Oprah] Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. She's been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright's anger-filled message didn't surprise her. But it just wasn't what she was looking for in a church." ...

In time, she found [a new church]: her own. "There is the Church of Oprah now," said her longtime friend, with a laugh. "She has her own following."

Friends of Sen. Barack Obama, whose relationship with Wright has rocked his bid for the White House, insist that it would be unfair to compare Winfrey's decision to leave Trinity United with his own decision to stay. "[His] reasons for attending Trinity were totally different,'' said one campaign adviser, who declined to be named discussing the Illinois senator's sentiments. "Early on, he was in search of his identity as an African-American and, more importantly, as an African-American man. Reverend Wright and other male members of the church were instrumental in helping him understand the black experience in America. Winfrey wasn't going for that. She's secure in her blackness, so that didn't have a hold on her.''

Once again, we come back to Obama's Achilles heel being the need to prove he's black enough.

Everybody always says that "Obama is comfortable in his own skin," yet his autobiographical writing is supremely uncomfortable. Last year, I called him "an unfunny Evelyn Waugh," and indeed in its "enough, already!" self-pity, Dreams from My Father is a little reminiscent of Waugh's more overly sincere autobiographical novels, such as Brideshead Revisited. Like Waugh, Obama's analyses of other people are coldly impeccable -- it's his self-conception that's worrisome.

In Britain, it wasn't unthinkable for a novelist to become Prime Minister, as, in fact, Disraeli did. But I don't think anybody ever recommended that Waugh enter politics. Nobody read Brideshead Revisited and said, "Yes, this is the kind of steady hand we want on the tiller of state."

With Obama, I just can't tell. I don't think it's too much to ask that he figure out some way to reassure the voters that his internal conflicts aren't going to get in the way of his duties.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What Obama wrote about Wright in 1995

Over the last week, there has been much speculation about why Barack Obama closely associated himself with Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. for two decades. Much of the speculation has been ill-informed.

So, for the purpose of better informing the American electorate, I'm going to quote below, at great length, from Chapter 14, pp. 274-295, of Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I'll leave out only the less Wright-related passages about Harold Washington's death, Obama's acceptance into Harvard Law School, and similar less germane matters.

I've tried to be more inclusive than exclusive, so that the public has a convenient opportunity to inform itself of exactly -- and in context -- what the Presidential candidate wrote in 1995 about his pastor.

Has Obama changed his mind since 1995? Possibly, yet in the Preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams from My Father, Obama denies, in his characteristically graceful yet obscure prose style, that he has changed much:

"I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine—that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research."

Quoting about 6,000 words of Obama's 442 page memoir raises obvious copyright questions. I would contend that, in the context of the tens of thousands of words I've written about Obama and Wright, this qualifies as "fair use." I would also argue a public policy justification, since Obama's relationship with Wright is widely considered to be a question of substantial political importance in determining who will be the next President of the United States.

If the copyright holder objects, however, I will take this down.

(To my readers uninterested in this topic, I'll just advise that holding down the Page Down key will take you to my earlier posts.)

The implied timeframe of the following chapter is September 1987 to February 1988, although I wouldn't be surprised if Obama compressed a series of events straggling over several years for the purpose of the dramatic unity. I don't see that it's terribly important one way or another.

Chapter 14 comprises the last and climactic part of the mid-section of the book: "Chicago."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IT WAS AN OLD BUILDING, in one of the South Side’s older neighborhoods, still sound but badly in need of tuckpointing and perhaps a new roof. The sanctuary was dark, with several pews that had cracked and splintered; the reddish carpet gave off a musty, damp odor; and at various points the floorboards beneath bucked and dipped like welts in a meadow. Reverend Philips’s office had this same chipped, worn quality, lit only by an antique desk lamp that cast the room in a dull, amber glow. And Reverend Philips himself-he was old. With the window shades drawn, surrounded by stacks of dusty old books, he seemed now to be receding into the wall, as still as a portrait, only his snow-white hair clearly visible, his voice sonorous and disembodied, like the voice of a dream.

We had been talking for close to an hour, mostly about the church. Not his church so much as the church, the historically black church, the church as an institution, the church as an idea. He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shores, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas-survival, and freedom, and hope. The reverend went on to recall the Southern church of his own youth, a small, whitewashed wooden place, he said, built with sweat and pennies saved from share-cropping, where on bright, hot Sunday mornings all the quiet terror and open wounds of the week drained away in tears and shouts of gratitude; the clapping, waving, fanning hands reddening the embers of those same stubborn ideas-survival, and freedom, and hope. He discussed Martin Luther King’s visit to Chicago and the jealousy he had witnessed among some of King’s fellow ministers, their fear of being usurped; and the emergence of the Muslims, whose anger Reverend Philips understood: It was his own anger, he said, an anger that he didn’t expect he would ever entirely escape but that through prayer he had learned to control-and that he had tried not to pass down to his children.

Now he was explaining the history of churches in Chicago. There were thousands of them, and it seemed as if he knew them all: the tiny storefronts and the large stone edifices; the high-yella congregations that sat stiff as cadets as they sang from their stern hymnals, and the charismatics who shook as their bodies expelled God’s unintelligible tongue. Most of the larger churches in Chicago had been a blend of these two forms, Reverend Philips explained, an example of segregation’s hidden blessings, the way it forced the lawyer and the doctor to live and worship right next to the maid and the laborer. Like a great pumping heart, the church had circulated goods, information, values, and ideas back and forth and back again, between rich and poor, learned and unlearned, sinner and saved.

He wasn’t sure, he said, how much longer his church would continue to serve that function. Most of his better-off members had moved away to tidier neighborhoods, suburban life. They still drove back every Sunday, out of loyalty or habit. But the nature of their involvement had changed. They hesitated to volunteer for anything-a tutoring program, a home visitation-that might keep them in the city after dark. They wanted more security around the church, a fenced-in parking lot to protect their cars. Reverend Philips expected that once he passed on, many of those members would stop coming back. They would start new churches, tidy like their new streets. He feared that the link to the past would be finally broken, that the children would no longer retain the memory of that first circle, around a fire….

His voice began to trail off; I felt he was getting tired. I asked him for introductions to other pastors who might be interested in organizing, and he mentioned a few names-there was a dynamic young pastor, he said, a Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who might be worth talking to; his message seemed to appeal to young people like me. Reverend Philips gave me his number, and as I got up to leave, I said, “If we could bring just fifty churches together, we might be able to reverse some of the trends you’ve been talking about."

Reverend Philips nodded and said, “You may be right, Mr. Obama. You have some interesting ideas. But you see, the churches around here are used to doing things their own way. Sometimes, the congregations even more than the pastors.” He opened the door for me, then paused. “By the way, what church do you belong to?”

“I…I attend different services."

“But you’re not a member anywhere?”

“Still searching, I guess."

“Well, I can understand that. It might help your mission if you had a church home, though. It doesn’t matter where, really. What you’re asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophecy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you’re getting yours from. Faith, that is."

Outside, I put on my sunglasses and walked past a group of older men who had set out their lawn chairs on the sidewalk for a game of bid whist. It was a gorgeous day, seventy-five in late September. Instead of driving straight to my next appointment, I decided to linger, letting my legs hang out the open car door, watching the old men play their game. They didn’t talk much, these men. They reminded me of the men Gramps used to play bridge with-the same thick, stiff hands; the same thin, natty socks and improbably slender shoes; the same beads of sweat along the folds of their necks, just beneath their flat caps. I tried to remember the names of those men back in Hawaii, what they had done for a living, wondering what residue of themselves they’d left in me. They had been mysteries to me then, those old black men; that mystery was part of what had brought me to Chicago. And now, now that I was leaving Chicago, I wondered if I understood them any better than before.

I hadn’t told anyone except Johnnie [Obama's right hand man in his community organizing group] about my decision. I figured there would be time for an announcement later; I wouldn’t even hear back from the law schools until January. …

And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process; about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real estate ventures succeeded or failed. I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.

That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before, as he had boarded the plane to America, the land of dreams. He, too, had probably believed he was acting out some grand design, that he wasn’t simply fleeing from possible inconsequence. And, in fact, he had returned to Kenya, hadn’t he? But only as a divided man, his plans, his dreams, soon turned to dust…. [ellipses in the original]

Would the same thing happen to me? Maybe Johnnie was right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin. Maybe, by going to law school, I’d be repeating a pattern that had been set in motion centuries before, the moment white men, themselves spurred on by their own fears of inconsequence, had landed on Africa’s shores, bringing with them their guns and blind hunger, to drag away the conquered in chains. That first encounter had redrawn the map of black life, recentered its universe, created the very idea of escape-an idea that lived on in Frank and those other old black men who had found refuge in Hawaii; in green-eyed Joyce back at Occidental, just wanting to be an individual; in Auma, torn between Germany and Kenya; in Roy, finding out that he couldn’t start over. And here, in the South Side, among members of Reverend Philips’s church, some of whom had probably marched alongside Dr. King, believing then that they marched for a higher purpose, for rights and for principles and for all God’s children, but who at some point had realized that power was unyielding and principles unstable, and that even after laws were passed and lynchings ceased, the closest thing to freedom would still involve escape, emotional if not physical, away from ourselves, away from what we knew, flight into the outer reaches of the white man’s empire-or closer into its bosom.

The analogies weren’t exactly right. The relationship between black and white, the meaning of escape, would never be quite the same for me as it had been for Frank, or for the Old Man, or even for Roy. And as segregated as Chicago was, as strained as race relations were, the success of the civil rights movement had at least created some overlap between communities, more room to maneuver for people like me. I could work in the black community as an organizer or a lawyer and still live in a high rise downtown. Or the other way around: I could work in a blue-chip law firm but live in the South Side and buy a big house, drive a nice car, make my donations to the NAACP and Harold’s campaign, speak at local high schools. A role model, they’d call me, an example of black male success.

Was there anything wrong with that? Johnnie obviously didn’t think so. He had smiled, I realized now, not because he judged me but precisely because he didn’t; because he, like my leaders, didn’t see anything wrong with such success.

That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?-that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals. No one expected self-sacrifice from me-not Rafiq, who of late had been pestering me about helping him raise money from white foundations for his latest scheme; not Reverend Smalls, who had decided to run for the state senator’s seat and was anxious for our support. As far as they were concerned, my color had always been a sufficient criterion for community membership, enough of a cross to bear.

Was that all that had brought me to Chicago, I wondered-the desire for such simple acceptance? That had been part of it, certainly, one meaning to community. But there had been another meaning, too, a more demanding impulse. Sure, you could be black and still not give a damn about what happened in Altgeld or Roseland. You didn’t have to care about boys like Kyle, young mothers like Bernadette or Sadie. But to be right with yourself, to do right by others, to lend meaning to a community’s suffering and take part in its healing-that required something more. It required the kind of commitment that Dr. Collier made every day out in Altgeld. It required the kind of sacrifices a man like Asante had been willing to make with his students.

It required faith. I glanced up now at the small, second-story window of the church, imagining the old pastor inside, drafting his sermon for the week. Where did your faith come from? he had asked. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have an answer. Perhaps, still, I had faith in myself. But faith in one’s self was never enough.

I stamped out my cigarette and started the car. I looked into my rearview mirror and, driving off, watched the old, silent cardplayers recede from my sight.

With Johnnie handling the organization’s day-to-day activities, I met with more black ministers in the area, hoping to convince them to join the organization. It was a slow process, for unlike their Catholic counterparts, most black pastors were fiercely independent, secure in their congregations and with little obvious need for outside assistance. Whenever I first reached them on the phone, they would often be suspicious or evasive, uncertain as to why this Muslim-or worse yet, this Irishman, O’Bama-wanted a few minutes of their time. And a handful I met with conformed to the prototypes found in Richard Wright novels or Malcolm X speeches: sanctimonious graybeards preaching pie-in-the-sky, or slick Holy Rollers with flashy cars and a constant eye on the collection plate.

For the most part, though, once I’d had a chance to meet these men face-to-face, I would come away impressed. As a group, they turned out to be thoughtful, hardworking men, with a confidence, a certainty of purpose, that made them by far the best organizers in the neighborhood. They were generous with their time, interested in the issues, surprisingly willing to open themselves to my scrutiny. One minister talked about a former gambling addiction. Another told me about his years as a successful executive and a secret drunk. They all mentioned periods of religious doubt; the corruption of the world and their own hearts; the striking bottom and shattering of pride; and then finally the resurrection of self, a self alloyed to something larger. That was the source of their confidence, they insisted: their personal fall, their subsequent redemption. It was what gave them the authority to preach the Good News.

Had I heard the Good News? some of them would ask me.

Do you know where it is that your faith is coming from?

When I asked for other pastors to talk to, several gave me the name of Reverend Wright, the same minister Reverend Philips had mentioned that day at his church. Younger ministers seemed to regard Reverend Wright as a mentor of sorts, his church a model for what they themselves hoped to accomplish. Older pastors were more cautious with their praise, impressed with the rapid growth of Trinity’s congregation but somewhat scornful of its popularity among young black professionals. (“A buppie church,” one pastor would tell me.)

Toward the end of October I finally got a chance to pay Reverend Wright a visit and see the church for myself. It sat flush on Ninety-fifth Street in a mostly residential neighborhood a few blocks down from the Louden Home projects. I had expected something imposing, but it turned out to be a low, modest structure of red brick and angular windows, landscaped with evergreens and sculpted shrubs and a small sign spiked into the grass-FREE SOUTH AFRICA in simple block letters. Inside, the church was cool and murmured with activity. A group of small children waited to be picked up from day care. A crew of teenage girls passed by, dressed for what looked like an African dance class. Four elderly women emerged from the sanctuary, and one of them shouted “God is good!” causing the others to respond giddily “All the time!”

Eventually a pretty woman with a brisk, cheerful manner came up and introduced herself as Tracy, one of Reverend Wright’s assistants. She said that the reverend was running a few minutes late and asked if I wanted some coffee. As I followed her back into a kitchen toward the rear of the church, we began to chat, about the church mostly, but also a little about her. It had been a difficult year, she said: Her husband had recently died, and in just a few weeks she’d be moving out to the suburbs. She had wrestled long and hard with the decision, for she had lived most of her life in the city. But she had decided the move would be best for her teenage son. She began to explain how there were a lot more black families in the suburbs these days; how her son would be free to walk down the street without getting harassed; how the school he’d be attending had music courses, a full band, free instruments and uniforms.

“He’s always wanted to be in a band,” she said softly.

As we were talking, I noticed a man in his late forties walking toward us. He had silver hair, a silver mustache and goatee; he was dressed in a gray three-piece suit. He moved slowly, methodically, as if conserving energy, sorting through his mail as he walked, humming a simple tune to himself.

“Barack,” he said as if we were old friends, “let’s see if Tracy here will let me have a minute of your time."

“Don’t pay him no mind, Barack,” Tracy said, standing up and straightening out her skirt. “I should have warned you that Rev likes to act silly sometimes."

Reverend Wright smiled and led me into a small, cluttered office. “Sorry for being late,” he said, closing the door behind him. “We’re trying to build a new sanctuary, and I had to meet with the bankers. I’m telling you, doc, they always want something else from you. Latest thing is another life insurance policy on me. In case I drop dead tomorrow. They figure the whole church’ll collapse without me."

“Is it true?”

Reverend Wright shook his head. “I’m not the church, Barack. If I die tomorrow, I hope the congregation will give me a decent burial. I like to think a few tears will be shed. But as soon as I’m six feet under, they’ll be right back on the case, figuring out how to make this church live up to its mission."

He had grown up in Philadelphia, the son of a Baptist minister. He had resisted his father’s vocation at first, joining the Marines out of college, dabbling with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism in the sixties. But the call of his faith had apparently remained, a steady tug on his heart, and eventually he’d entered Howard, then the University of Chicago, where he spent six years studying for a Ph.D. in the history of religion. He learned Hebrew and Greek, read the literature of Tillich and Niebuhr and the black liberation theologians. The anger and humor of the streets, the book learning and occasional twenty-five-cent word, all this he had brought with him to Trinity almost two decades ago. And although it was only later that I would learn much of this biography, it became clear in that very first meeting that, despite the reverend’s frequent disclaimers, it was this capacious talent of his-this ability to hold together, if not reconcile, the conflicting strains of black experience-upon which Trinity’s success had ultimately been built.

“We got a lot of different personalities here,” he told me. “Got the Africanist over here. The traditionalist over here. Once in a while, I have to stick my hand in the pot-smooth things over before stuff gets ugly. But that’s rare. Usually, if somebody’s got an idea for a new ministry, I just tell ’em to run with it and get outta their way."

His approach had obviously worked: the church had grown from two hundred to four thousand members during his tenure; there were organizations for every taste, from yoga classes to Caribbean clubs. He was especially pleased with the church’s progress in getting more men involved, although he admitted that they still had a way to go.

“Nothing’s harder than reaching young brothers like yourself,” he said. “They worry about looking soft. They worry about what their buddies are gonna say about ’em. They tell themselves church is a woman’s thing-that it’s a sign of weakness for a man to admit that he’s got spiritual needs."

The reverend looked up at me then, a look that made me nervous. I decided to shift the conversation to more familiar ground, telling him about DCP and the issues we were working on, explaining the need for involvement from larger churches like his. He sat patiently and listened to my pitch, and when I was finished he gave a small nod.

“I’ll try to help you if I can,” he said. “But you should know that having us involved in your effort isn’t necessarily a feather in your cap."

“Why’s that?” Reverend Wright shrugged. “Some of my fellow clergy don’t appreciate what we’re about. They feel like we’re too radical. Others, we ain’t radical enough. Too emotional. Not emotional enough. Our emphasis on African history, on scholarship-”

“Some people say,” I interrupted, “that the church is too upwardly mobile."

The reverend’s smile faded. “That’s a lot of bull,” he said sharply. “People who talk that mess reflect their own confusion. They’ve bought into the whole business of class that keeps us from working together. Half of ’em think that the former gang-banger or the former Muslim got no business in a Christian church. Other half think any black man with an education or a job, or any church that respects scholarship, is somehow suspect.

“We don’t buy into these false divisions here. It’s not about income, Barack. Cops don’t check my bank account when they pull me over and make me spread-eagle against the car. These miseducated brothers, like that sociologist at the University of Chicago, talking about ‘the declining significance of race.’ Now, what country is he living in?”

But wasn’t there a reality to the class divisions, I wondered? I mentioned the conversation I’d had with his assistant, the tendency of those with means to move out of the line of fire. He took off his glasses and rubbed what I now saw to be a pair of tired eyes.

“I’ve given Tracy my opinion about moving out of the city,” he said quietly. “That boy of hers is gonna get out there and won’t have a clue about where, or who, he is."

“It’s tough to take chances with your child’s safety."

“Life’s not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be."

A secretary buzzed, reminding Reverend Wright of his next appointment. We shook hands, and he agreed to have Tracy prepare a list of members for me to meet. Afterward, in the parking lot, I sat in my car and thumbed through a silver brochure that I’d picked up in the reception area. It contained a set of guiding principles-a “Black Value System”-that the congregation had adopted in 1979. At the top of the list was a commitment to God, “who will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become Black Christian activists, soldiers for Black freedom and the dignity of all humankind.” Then a commitment to the black community and black family, education, the work ethic, discipline, and self-respect.

A sensible, heartfelt list-not so different, I suspected, from the values old Reverend Philips might have learned in his whitewashed country church two generations before. There was one particular passage in Trinity’s brochure that stood out, though, a commandment more self-conscious in its tone, requiring greater elaboration. “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness,” the heading read. “While it is permissible to chase ‘middleincomeness’ with all our might,” the text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the “psychological entrapment of Black ‘middleclassness’ that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘they’ instead of ‘US’!”

[It's informative to quote that "value" in full from Trinity's website:

8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.” Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.

Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:

  1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.
  2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
  3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.”
  4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of Black “middleclassness.” If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B. And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.]

My thoughts would often return to that declaration in the weeks that followed as I met with various members of Trinity. I decided that Reverend Wright was at least partly justified in dismissing the church’s critics, for the bulk of its membership was solidly working class, the same teachers and secretaries and government workers one found in other big black churches throughout the city. Residents from the nearby housing project had been actively recruited, and programs designed to meet the needs of the poor-legal aid, tutorials, drug programs-took up a substantial amount of the church’s resources.

Still, there was no denying that the church had a disproportionate number of black professionals in its ranks: engineers, doctors, accountants, and corporate managers. Some of them had been raised in Trinity; others had transferred in from other denominations. Many confessed to a long absence from any religious practice-a conscious choice for some, part of a political or intellectual awakening, but more often because church had seemed irrelevant to them as they’d pursued their careers in largely white institutions.

At some point, though, they all told me of having reached a spiritual dead end; a feeling, at once inchoate and oppressive, that they’d been cut off from themselves. Intermittently, then more regularly, they had returned to the church, finding in Trinity some of the same things every religion hopes to offer its converts: a spiritual harbor and the chance to see one’s gifts appreciated and acknowledged in a way that a paycheck never can; an assurance, as bones stiffened and hair began to gray, that they belonged to something that would outlast their own lives-and that, when their time finally came, a community would be there to remember.

But not all of what these people sought was strictly religious, I thought; it wasn’t just Jesus they were coming home to. It occurred to me that Trinity, with its African themes, its emphasis on black history, continued the role that Reverend Philips had described earlier as a redistributor of values and circulator of ideas. Only now the redistribution didn’t run in just a single direction from the schoolteacher or the physician who saw it as a Christian duty to help the sharecropper or the young man fresh from the South adapt to big-city life. The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well; the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation-claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity, their presence in the church providing the lawyer or doctor with an education from the streets. By widening its doors to allow all who would enter, a church like Trinity assured its members that their fates remained inseparably bound, that an intelligible “us” still remained.

It was a powerful program, this cultural community, one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing. Still, I couldn’t help wondering whether it would be enough to keep more people from leaving the city or young men out of jail. Would the Christian fellowship between a black school administrator, say, and a black school parent change the way the schools were run? Would the interest in maintaining such unity allow Reverend Wright to take a forceful stand on the latest proposals to reform public housing? And if men like Reverend Wright failed to take a stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage with real power and risk genuine conflict, then what chance would there be of holding the larger community intact?

Sometimes I would put such questions to the people I met with. They would respond with the same bemused look Reverend Philips and Reverend Wright had given me. For them, the principles in Trinity’s brochure were articles of faith no less than belief in the Resurrection. You have some good ideas, they would tell me. Maybe if you joined the church you could help us start a community program. Why don’t you come by on Sunday?

And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.

The day before Thanksgiving, [Chicago mayor] Harold Washington died.

In February, I received my acceptance from Harvard. …

I had scheduled a luncheon that week at our office for the twenty or so ministers whose churches had agreed to join the organization. …

I woke up at six A.M. that Sunday. It was still dark outside. I shaved, brushed the lint from my only suit, and arrived at the church by seven-thirty. Most of the pews were already filled. A white-gloved usher led me past elderly matrons in wide plumaged hats, tall unsmiling men in suits and ties and mud-cloth kufis, children in their Sunday best. A parent from Dr. Collier’s school waved at me; an official from the CHA with whom I’d had several run-ins nodded curtly. I shunted through to the center of a row and stuffed myself between a plump older woman who failed to scoot over and a young family of four, the father already sweating in his coarse woolen jacket, the mother telling the two young boys beside her to stop kicking each other.

“Where’s God?” I overheard the toddler ask his brother.

“Shut up,” the older boy replied.

“Both of you settle down right now,” the mother said.

Trinity’s associate pastor, a middle-aged woman with graying hair and a no-nonsense demeanor, read the bulletin and led sleepy voices through a few traditional hymns. Then the choir filed down the aisle dressed in white robes and kentecloth shawls, clapping and singing as they fanned out behind the altar, an organ following the quickening drums:

I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me!
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me!
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me!
Singing Glory, Ha-le-lu-yah!
Jesus lifted me!

As the congregation joined in, the deacons, then Reverend Wright, appeared beneath the large cross that hung from the rafters. The reverend remained silent while devotions were read, scanning the faces in front of him, watching the collection basket pass from hand to hand. When the collection was over, he stepped up to the pulpit and read the names of those who had passed away that week, those who were ailing, each name causing a flutter somewhere in the crowd, the murmur of recognition.

“Let us join hands,” the reverend said, “as we kneel and pray at the foot of an old rugged cross-”

“Yes…”

“Lord, we come first to thank you for what you’ve already done for us…. We come to thank you most of all for Jesus. Lord, we come from different walks of life. Some considered high, and some low…but all on equal ground at the foot of this cross. Lord, thank you! For Jesus, Lord…our burden bearer and heavy load sharer, we thank you…."

The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel-the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting titled Hope.

“The painting depicts a harpist,” Reverend Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountain-top, worrying about paying the light bill. But also the pain of those closer to the metaphorical summit: the middle-class woman who seems to have all her worldly needs taken care of but whose husband is treating her like “the maid, the household service, the jitney service, and the escort service all rolled into one”; the child whose wealthy parents worry more about “the texture of hair on the outside of the head than the quality of education inside the head."

“Isn’t that…the world that each of us stands on?”

“Yessuh!”

“Like Hannah, we have known bitter times! Daily, we face rejection and despair!”

“Say it!”

“And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope…. She has the audacity…to make music…and praise God…on the one string…she has left!”

People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters. As I watched and listened from my seat, I began to hear all the notes from the past three years swirl about me. The courage and fear of Ruby and Will. The race pride and anger of men like Rafiq. The desire to let go, the desire to escape, the desire to give oneself up to a God that could somehow put a floor on despair.

And in that single note-hope!-I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories-of survival, and freedom, and hope-became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shamed about, memories more accessible than those of ancient Egypt, memories that all people might study and cherish-and with which we could start to rebuild. And if a part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us and would fulfill its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.

“The audacity of hope! I still remember my grandmother, singing in the house, ‘There’s a bright side somewhere…don’t rest till you find it….’”

“That’s right!”

“The audacity of hope! Times when we couldn’t pay the bills. Times when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to amount to anything…at the age of fifteen, busted for grand larceny auto theft…and yet and still my momma and daddy would break into a song… Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.
Thank you, Je-sus, Thank you, Lo-ord.
You brought me fro-om
A mighty long way, mighty long way.

“And it made no sense to me, this singing! Why were they thanking Him for all of their troubles? I’d ask myself. But see, I was only looking at the horizontal dimension of their lives!”

“Tell it now!”

“I didn’t understand that they were talking about the vertical dimension! About their relationship to God! I didn’t understand that they were thanking Him in advance for all that they dared to hope for in me! Oh, I thank you, Jesus, for not letting go of me when I let go of you! Oh yes, Jesus, I thank you…."

As the choir lifted back up into song, as the congregation began to applaud those who were walking to the altar to accept Reverend Wright’s call, I felt a light touch on the top of my hand. I looked down to see the older of the two boys sitting beside me, his face slightly apprehensive as he handed me a pocket tissue. Beside him, his mother glanced at me with a faint smile before turning back toward the altar. It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks.

“Oh, Jesus,” I heard the older woman beside me whisper softly. “Thank you for carrying us this far."

The third section of the book, "Kenya," covers pp. 297-430. It describes Obama's visit to his father's country later in 1988. This is followed by an Epilogue, briefly covering the period up through Obama's 1992 wedding. Rev. Wright is only mentioned once more in the book, on pp. 440, as presiding at the wedding.

As far as I can tell, Jesus doesn't come up at all after pp. 295.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer