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Today's
Stories
March 18, 2008
David Price
The
Military "Leveraging" of Cultural Knowledge
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Collapse of American Power
March 17, 2008
Pam Martens
The
Fed's Wall Street Dilemma
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The US, Iran and the Policy of Dual Containment
Nelson P. Valdés
The Imperial Branding of Simon Bolivar and the Cuban Revolution
Peter Morici
The Corrosive Consequences of the Trade Deficit
Wajahat Ali
Disrobing the Nine: a Conversation with Jeffrey Toobin on the
Supreme Court Since 9/11
Ronnie Cummins
Beyond Progressive Malpractice: Taking Down Big Pharma
Shaun Harkin
Saint Patrick's Day in Fortress America
Ali Khan
No Pardon for Musharraf
Robert Jensen
Beyond Peace
P. Sainath
Oh, What a Lovely Waiver!
Greg Moses
Jeremiah was a Bullhorn
Dr. Susan Block
Advice for Eliot Spitzer
Website of the Day
No Cowboys
March 15 /
16, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
How
to Destroy a Country in Five Years
Mike Whitney
Bearly
Alive: Investment Giant Rushed to ICU by Panicky Fed Chief
Ralph Nader
Of
Laws and Men
Robert Pollin
It's Still the Economy, Stupid
Diane Christian
The Poetics of Perversity: From Boccaccio to Spitzer
Wajahat Ali
Faking the Hood: a Conversation with Ishmael Reed
Tom Wright
/
Therese Saliba
Rachel Corrie's Case for Justice
Alan Farago
Back to Florida: Where Bushtime Began
Greg Moses
Raiding the Family Room in Texas
Michael Hudson
A Grand Global Bargain?
Martha Rosenberg
Why Hillary's Favorite Chicken Company is Eying China
John Goekler
Fourth Generation Warfare in a Fifth Generation Conflict
Uzma Aslam
Khan
A Letter to Barack Obama: Where's the Change, Barack?
Oren Ben-Dor
The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon
David Underhill
Mammon, Morals and the Mobile Tanker Deal
Fred Gardner
The Education of Eliot Spitzer
David Michael
Green
Why Spitzer Should Have Resigned (and Why He Shouldn't Have)
Rev. William E. Alberts
Jesus, Entombed in Heaven
Gail Dines
It's All About the John: Prostitution and Male Power
David Yearsley
Conducting, Anarchy and the Problem of When to Begin
Chris Clarke
Walking with Zeke: the Luckiest of Dogs
Poets' Basement
Anderson, Lodge & Subiet
Website of
the Day
Deviant Art
March 14, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Watching
the Dollar Die
Don Santina
Vichy
Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Mother Vows Revenge on US: How She Lost Her Husband and Her Sons
Tim Rinne
StratCom
Rules! The Next War Will Start in Nebraska
Robert Fantina
In
Torture We Trust
Saul Landau
Letter
to the Presidents-in-Waitings
David Macaray
Common
Myths About Labor Unions
Franklin Lamb
Is
the Bush Administration Switching Horses in Lebanon
Michael Neumann
The
One State Illusion: Reply to My Critics
March 13, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Republicans
and "Free Market" Zealots Bring Disaster to America
Mike Whitney
Meltdown
Looms Larger As Credit Markets Freeze
Assaf Kfoury
"One-State
or Two State?"- Sterile Debate on False Alternatives
Andy Worthington
Afghan
Hero Who Died in Guantánamo: The Background to the Story
Adam Federman
From
Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road
March 12, 2008
Dave Lindorff
Bringing
Down Spitzer: It's the Big Brother Who Should Bother US
R.F. Blader
The
Spitzer Backlash
Yonatan Mendel
How
to be an Israeli Journalist. Never Write "Murder" or
"Palestine"
Jonathan Cook
One
State or Two? Neither. The Issue is Zionism
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Fallon
and Gates -- At Least One Cheer
James J. Brittain
Was
the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders
Ron Jacobs
"All
the Money You Make Will Never Buy Back Your Soul"
March 11, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
to End the Subprime Crisis
Ed O'Loughlin
How
Israeli Troops Invade Homes in Gaza, Brutalize, Smash and Steal
Ramzy Baroud
'Unwavering
Commitment' to Inequality
Kathy Christison
One
State or Two? The Debate Over Israel and Palestine
China Hand
PRC
Plays it Cool, as U.S. Tries to Amp Up Pressure on Iran
John Joslin
Thank
You, Nafta! Welcome to Weirton, Home of the Discount Cigarette
Mike Averko
Serb
Politics, Kosovo and the Moscow-Washington Divide
Ben Rosenfeld
Gavin
Newsom's Kneejerk Plan
Thierry Paquot
High
Rise, Low Spirits:The Curse of the Tower Block
March 10, 2008
Uri Avnery
"Kill
A Hundred Turks and Rest": The Five-Day War in Gaza
Col. Dan Smith
Scoring
the "Surge" and What Lies Beyond
R.F. Blader
Why
"Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Key" is Losing its
Sheen
Michael Neumann
The
One-State Illusion: More is Less
Bob Fitrakis
and Harvey Wasserman
Did
the Republicans Give Hillary Her Victory in Ohio?
James J. Brittain
Anti-Uribe
Protests in Colombia and the World
Missy Comley
Beattie
The
Passion of John McCain
March 8-9,
2008 Weekend Edition
JoAnn Wypijewski
The
Only Way to Fight the Clintons
Mike Whitney
Sorting
Through the Rubble in Post Bubble America
Peter Morici
Fed
and Treasury Fiddle as Economy Plummets
Ralph Nader
The
Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering that Candidates Ignore
Jonathan Cook
The
Meaning of Gaza's Shoah
Steve Niva
Behind
the Israeli Escalation in Gaza
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Crisis
over Teheran's Alleged Nuclear Plans Nearing Climax
Hervé
Do Alto and Franck Poupeau
Bolivia:
Morales is Checked
Eric Walberg
To
Leave and Stay at the Same Time: Putin to Medvedev to ... ?
Scott Johnson
City
of A Thousand Foreclosures
Mark Scaramella
James
Brown's Gate
Bill Clinton
President
Clinton's Remarks on Naming William M. Daley as NAFTA Task Force
Chairman
Poet's Basement
St.
Thomasino, Engel, Davies and Willson
Website of
the Weekend
Hillary
Blackens Barack
March 7, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
Why
Iraq Could Blow-Up in John McCain's Face
Robin Blackburn
Question
for Barrack Obama: Why Afghanistan is the 'Right War'?
Saul Landau
The
Stupid Economy
Binoy Kampmark
When
Competition is Good: McCain and the Muddled Democrats
Chris Floyd
Crushing
the Ants: Admiral Fallon and His Empire
Andy Worthington
Spanish
Drop "Inhuman" Extradition Request for Guantánamo
Britons
Will Potter
Before
the Smoke Even Clears in Seattle: Bringing Out the T Word
March 6, 2008
March 6, 2008
Vincent Navarro
The
Next Failure of Health Reform
Forrest Hylton
High Stakes in the Andes: Colombia's Cornered President
Peter Morici
Why the Dollar is So Cheap
George Ciccariello-Maher
Counter-Attack of the Bureaucrats
John Ross
Taxi! Taxi! The Dark Side of the Oscars
Jacob Hornberger
No Standing to Lecture on Justice
Paul Watson
Illegal Japanese Whaling by the Numbers
Dan Bacher
Off the Deep End
Website of the Day
A Katrina Reader Online
March 5, 2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
A
Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)
Joanne Mariner
After Guantanamo
Fidel Castro
The Raid on Ecuador: Underestimating Rafael Correa
Christopher
Brauchli
The Turkish Invasions
Steven Sherman
Obama and the Prospects for a Renewal of the Left
Dave Lindorff
Busting Bush & Co. in New England
James Murren
Bombing Somalia
Adam Engel
Necropolis Now
Website of Day
Remember Song
March 4, 2008
Wajahat Ali
Mumbo
Jumbo: Naming Names with Ishmael Reed
William Blum
How Could Hillary Have Known?
Bill Quigley
The Cleansing of New Orleans
Ralph Nader
The Prince Harry Solution
Patrick Irelan
Oil and Health in Venezuela
James J. Brittain
/
R. James Sacouman
Uribe's Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin America
Norman Solomon
The War Election
Jacob Hornberger
Hillary in Waco: the Missing Apology
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the European Parliament
Mike Averko
Kosovo and the Press
Website of the Day
Tex-Mex Primary
March 3, 2008
Jennifer Loewenstein
Gazan Holocaust
Alan Farago
American Politics and the Faltering Economy
Richard Gott
Colombian Deaths in Ecuador
Wajahat Ali
Who Speaks for a Billion Muslims? Analyzing the World Gallup
Poll with John Esposito
Paul Craig Roberts
The Mukasey Conspiracy: a Bi-Partisan Attack on the Constitution
Robert Weissman
When Multinationals Say Adieu
Uri Avnery
Good Morning, Hamas
Martha Rosenberg
When Your Meat is a Downer
Eva Liddell
Leave the Next Dance for Bill
Michael Donnelly
Will Ferrell Does Flint
Website of the Day
Muddy Waters: Train Fare Home Blues
March 1 / 2,
2008
Alexander Cockburn
The
Race Card
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Political Trial of Don Siegelman
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Nader the Best Antidote to American Imperialism
Nelson P. Valdés
Cuba After Fidel
Christopher Brauchli
Meet Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev: Friend of Bill, George and Dick
Ron Jacobs
Inside the Secret City: Bomb Making at Oak Ridge
John Ross
The New Conquistadores: Spain's Reconquest of Mexico
Robert Fantina
Posturing Over Patriotism: Obama and Those Lapel Pins
Robert Weissman
Hidden in Plain Sight: Human Rights Hypocrisy
Mohammed Omer
Fear in Gaza
Remi Kanazi
Barack Obama and the Politics of Xenophobia
Bob Jackson
Why is Yellowstone Destroying Its Bison Herd?
Richard Rhames
Casual Threats: Loaded with Mercury
Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Awaits the Arrival of the USS Cole
Rannie Amiri
Showboat Diplomacy: US Warships Steam Toward Lebanon
David Michael
Green
The Three Faces of Hillary: the Politics of Flim-Flam
Conn Hallinan
Notes from the Southern Cone
Faheem Hussain
Prince Harry of Afghanistan and the Meaning of Normalcy
Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Gardner and Ford
Website of
the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Help!
February 29,
2008
Matt Gonzalez
The
Obama Craze
Jonathan Cook
Academic Freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel
Joshua Frank
Obama and Israel
Anthony DiMaggio
The Unilateral Presidency: Signing Statements and the Rollback
of American Law
Linn Washington, Jr.
Cop Abuse in America
Binoy Kampmark
Hubris and Nemesis
Robert Bryce
Energy Efficiency May be a Good Thing, But It Won't Cut Energy
Use
Sonja Karkar
Australia's Government Continues Its Love Affair with Israel
Dave Lindorff
A Manchurian Candidate in the White House? Obama or Bush?
Website of
the Day
Olduvai George
February 28,
2008
Patrick Cockburn
"Iraq"
Falls Apart
Fred Gardner
The Birth of NAFTA
Michael Levitin
The Crisis in Kosovo is Just Beginning
William S.
Lind
The Fake State of Kosovo
David Macaray
A Ray of Hope for Organized Labor
Stephen Fleischman
Nader's Latest Run: Monkey Wrench or Cattle Prod?
George Wuerthner
The Myths of Forest Health: Why Ecological Logging is an Oxymoron
Laura Carlsen
The North American Union Farce
Carl Finamore
Why the Delta-Northwest Deal Hasn't Taken Off
Michael Dickinson
The Day I Bombed the House of Commons
Website of the Day
Plane Stupid
February 27,
2008
David Rosen
Playing
the Race Card: Obama, Love Across the Color Line and Political
Dirty Tricks
Vijay Prashad
Bomber John: McCain and the 100 Year War
Harvey Wasserman
Incident at Turkey Point: Did Florida Go to the Radioactive Brink?
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Shambolic Trials: Pentagon Boss Resigns,
Ex-Prosecutor Joins Defense
Wajahat Ali
Pakistan for Sale: an Interview with Ayesha Siddiqa on Pakistan's
Military Economy
Peter Morici
The Auction-Rate Securities Fiasco: a Drama of Greed and Betrayal
Stephen Philion
Conspiracy Theory, Fears of Betrayal and Today's Anti-War Movement
Michael Donnelly
Obama by Unanimous Decision
Erica Rosenberg /
Janine Blaeloch
After the Land Deals: Will There
be Any Wilderness Left to Protect?
Website of
the Day
Dress Blues
February 26,
2008
Debbie Nathan
Confessions
of a Gitmo Guard
Alan Dershowitz
v. Frank Menetrez
On Finkelstein
Harvey Wasserman
How Ohio Got Nuked
Michael Colby
Ralph Nader vs. the Fundamentalist Liberals
Gary Leupp
Condi vs. Putin on Bullying Belgrade
David Orchard
The New Conquistadors: Canada in Afghanistan
Martha Rosenberg
The Big HRT
Fran Shor
The Electoral Circus and Nader's Sideshow
Serge Halimi
The Dom Perignon Socialist Manifesto: Bernard Henri-Levy's Plan
for the French Left
Global Balkans
Neo-Liberalism and Protectorate States in the Post-Yugoslav Balkans:
an Interview with Tariq Ali
Website of
the Day
Texistentialism
February 25,
2008
Roger Morris
A
Death in Damascus
Anthony DiMaggio
Military
Bases, the Media and the Democrats
Ralph Nader
Why I'm Running
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Broils
Paul Craig Roberts
Kosovo and the Empire Crazies
Peter Morici
Bernanke's Failing Policies: a Long Recession Looms
Dave Lindorff
General Welch's Whitewash: What We Still Don't Know About That
Minot Nuke Incident
Saul Landau
/
Farrah Hassen
Fanatics, Mountebanks and Drillers: a Bloody Oil Film
Heather Gray
James Orange, Civil Rights Legend
Robert Weitzel
Accomodating Torture
John Halle
Kucinich Goes Down
Website of the Day
Do the Trunk Monkey!
February 23 / 4, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
The
Mushrooming Clouds That Hang Over McCain
Paul Craig
Roberts
Obama
and Global Trade
Wajahat Ali
Omissions of the Commission: an Interview with Phillip Shenon
on the 9/11 Commission
Ralph Nader
Neutering the FDA
Jürgen
Vsych
"What Was Ralph Nader Thinking?"
Fidel Castro
Watching the US Presidential Campaign from Havana
Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo
David Macaray
Unions Under Assault
Jeremy Scahill
The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence
David Krieger
Stanley Sheinbaum
Caging the Cold War Monster
Ron Jacobs
Building for the Future
Michael Garrity
The Last, Best Hope for the Northern Rockies
Brian McKenna
Higher Ed's "Civic Engagements" Get Dumbed Down
Missy Beattie
Over the Hill with John McCain
Fred Gardner
American College of Physicians Takes Pro-Cannabis Stand (Mostly)
Boris Kagarlitsky
The Growth of the Russian Labor Movement
Mike Ferner
Kick That Barrel
Dan Bacher
On the Trail with the Border Angels
Christopher
Ketcham
Hillary Goes Where Obama Fears to Tread
Poets' Basement
Davies and Buknatski
Website of
the Weekend
Obama
Mariachi
February 22,
2008
Mike Whitney
The
Bonfire of Capital
Jason Hribal
Elephants and the Circus: The Story of Janet
Liaquat Ali Khan
Arresting Musharraf
Joshua Frank
That Obama Glow: the Nuclear Industry's Golden Child
Dave Lindorff
Vicki's John: Ask Not What She Did for Him, Ask What He Did for
Her!
Liliana Segura
When Torture is Old News: McCain's Blonde Diversion
Robert Fantina
Castro, Bush and Cuba: a Fiasco Waiting to Happen?
Yifat Susskind
The ABCs of Death: Bush vs. Africa's Women
Norm Kent
Pushing 60 with Pot
Website of
the Day
Bush Gets Down in Liberia
February 21,
2008
Saul Landau
Fidel
Steps Aside
Elizabeth Schulte
Left Behind, With No End in Sight: America's Long-Term Unemployed
Helen Redmond
Health Care as a Human Right
Benjamin Dangl
Undermining Bolivia
Michael Levitin
Kosovo's Dilemma
Liam Leonard
Fear and Loathing on the Emerald Isle
Patrick Irelan
Land and Food in Venezuela
Linn Cohen-Cole
Poor Ohio: a Second Letter to Hillary on Her Ties to Monsanto
Michael Simmons
Daydream Believer: John Stewart, the Miles Davis of Folk Music
CounterPunch
News Service
A Message from the Women of Okinawa to US GIs
Website of the Day
Cop Abuse in Shreveport
|
March
18, 2008
Jeremiah Wright,
Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth
Of
National Lies and Racial America
By TIM WISE
For most white folks, indignation just
doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one
of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when
he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere
above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for
most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during,
indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in
this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous
persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the
best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of
moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness
tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming
at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church
of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and
the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for
merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained
so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime
that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness
to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by
most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry
black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill
of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation,
no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth.
And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and
as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be
clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such
a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America
"got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that
black people should be singing "God Damn America" because
of its treatment of the African American community throughout
the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks
of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect,
predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to
roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or
to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather,
it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around,
indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological
grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in
more than enough violence against innocent people to make it
just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage
about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far
more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye."
That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane
people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence
of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most
definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even  self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later
most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that
they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."
But not only does such a calculus
suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the
lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi
or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified
documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which
indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to
end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even
without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which
these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity
and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed
premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification
whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate
mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses
than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when
we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah,
because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the
First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize
for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts
are."
And Wright didn't say blacks
should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting
that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has
treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving
of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds
of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession),
even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the
data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking
around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about
what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should
or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully
in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although
one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and
don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation
states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for
blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that
America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence
and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly
disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government
created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it
is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has
said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that
Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral
crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very
same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when
he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people
whom the government deemed "undesirable" including
gays and racial minorities.
So that's the truth of the
matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but
which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black
man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of
all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate.
And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of
the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just
enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or
the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most
preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity
ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you
to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had
he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is,
he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in
good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate
in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah
Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows,
and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew
it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism
on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color,
was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate
crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday
life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the
conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched
(as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War,
according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time);
millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth.
No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not
on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything
changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at
what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when
their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at
Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some,
everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico,
only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to
a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some,
being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life.
Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard
time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible
to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what
seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the
recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with
the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the
world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view
America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that
this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the
falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to
a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned
compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin
was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street,
wherein he noted:
"White children, in the
main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp
of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described
as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White
people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in
this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky:
a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example,
sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."
And so we were shocked in 1987,
when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate
the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most
of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and
to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had
been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that
black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented
racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that
lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're
literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination
regularly (and who have the social science research to back them
up) actually think that those experiences and that data might
actually say something about the nation in which they reside.
Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by
what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because
what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding
of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the
most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city
on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking
at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting
its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main,
get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people
do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for
they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still
not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder
time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt
out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites
sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing
Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into
previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and
then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that
he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or
perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford
to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis
when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when
they discover that such events were not just a couple of good
old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to
the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were
never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events,
advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving
hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun,
eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims
of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and
then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers.
They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded
as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of
their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and
confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise
the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not
be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site
of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city
officials literally went into the town library and removed all
reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from
the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault
on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or
perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to
our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling,
even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national
past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview
so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version
of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it
so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it
is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people
of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant,
their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously.
In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable
of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and
"Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced
from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as
to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found
them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations
of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false,
they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people,
who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework
in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and
Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America
are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and
to the extent we still love them and view them as representations
of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return,
still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have
long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to
Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed
thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor
of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville
Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students
from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before
America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image
of national life they represented, those black students were
finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged,
viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling
children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the
1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks
to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people
to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who
distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks
do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great
country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations
of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has
cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who
have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by
defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological
in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not
merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into
an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in
terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin
wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country
with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in
warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make
mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing
that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always
about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms,
and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on
in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded.
When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as
though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a
nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where
adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows
one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the
respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions
and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing
but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say
is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we
can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity
it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed
ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward,
because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that
which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation
where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without
so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by
the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who
tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only
for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares
white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship
resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling
bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white
preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and
precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or
lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often
overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior
they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in
every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every
children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas
card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But
to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear
false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is
no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these
preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as
they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a
belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy
belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil
that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many
of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that
theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor
of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a
question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying
that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the
Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd
be heading.
So you can curse God in this
way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse
him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no
one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't
considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified
from becoming President in the minds of millions because they
go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because
they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see
nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah
Wright because he challenges their views about their country.
Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests,
every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright
serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be
offended.
Pardon me, but something is
wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity
United Church of Christ.
Tim Wise is the author of: White
Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft
Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative
Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge:
2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com
This essay originally appeared
in Lip.
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