Barack Obama asked us to educate ourselves about our differences rather than focus on them. In that spirit, I think you should read rikyrah’s thoughts on the black church. Here’s a sample.
Black people do not change churches like they do purses. I am in my 30’s, and outside of school, I’ve had exactly 2 church homes in my life. It took nearly 2 years to find the second one, but I found it. Commitment to a church isn’t something that’s done fly-by-night. It’s not some fleeting commitment. It is a given that you will find something that you don’t like about any church you attend; which is why it is the general COMMUNITY that will ultimately make that decision.
The Black Church is the ONLY institution, in the history of The United States of America, which, from its conception,
Validated, Supported, Incubated, and Treasured.
BLACK HUMANITY.
Period.
Don’t think I’m correct, then name me another institution which has done so.
The attack on Trinity is seen as an attack on the Black Church, and thus, by extension, an attack on the Black Community as a whole.
During times of slavery and Jim Crow, the Black Church was what reinforced Community.
Post Civil Rights and Integration, the Black Church is now what brings Community together, considering that the Black Community, like the rest of America, is becoming more stratified along the lines of class. The Black Church is really the only place in Black America where you will consistently find the doctor and welfare mother in the same building, with the same purpose. It’s the place to break down those walls of class that are building up.
To disown Wright and Trinity would be to disown the Black Community itself, which is why Obama said in his speech he couldn’t. He understood that fundamentally about the Black Community, and he understood that political expediency would mean the doubting of the existence of his soul by the Black community. Obama would never be trusted again by Black folk if he had disowned Wright & Trinity. Even Black folk that don’t go to church understand that you don’t mess with the Black Church – it’s just not done.
Anyone that has spent any time at all doing political activism in the black community will understand this. Unfortunately, far too few white activists have worked in and with the black community. There is a cultural divide and it isn’t easy to bridge. But one thing I know is that Bill and Hillary Clinton (and their campaign manager, Maggie Williams) fully understand what they’re messing with. And they don’t care.
Also, see the Field Negro and Skeptical Brotha.
So was it the Right(tm) thing to do?
As I was watching the whole media spectacle over the Wright soundbites, I couldn’t help but think of something like this. While I have no real knowledge of Black Church Protocol, I suspected that some of the faux-outrage actors had their talking points for a reason. It seemed like they were always goading Obama to go one step further – to get him to throw his pastor and church under the bus so that they could show him as a phony and a traitor to his community and (they hoped) cause him to lose his black support. It was a catch-22, as these fuax outrage campaigns usually are.
It seems he passed the test.
Yep. That echoes the point I made yesterday. It’s not just getting up and leaving. And you’re right, the Clinton’s know this and they don’t care. It’s another dog whistle to White America that doesn’t understand that in the black community, the church/mosque isn’t just a place of worship, it’s another family.
What an asshole.
Watch your mouth! Jerome’s going to show up here again and badmouth you. 😛
Plus he doesn’t know a thing about Missouri.
And I find it inherently dishonest for a blogger who has made his fame on a site that looks at polling to draw conclusions about November results from March polls:
Already cost us our chances …. yeah right. Those polls have NO CHANCE of changing before November. None. Whatsoever.
But really. Who cares what he thinks? He’s free to express his opinions (and that’s all they are) and we’re free to ignore them. It’s not like he’s Tim Russert and can actually influence anyone.
And based on what we saw on primary election day, if Obama is within 5 points on election day he wins. Obama is still not well known other than amongst Democratic primary voters and the models on turnout will be wrong if he heads up the ticket.
More to the point, I just made a post on what happens when you go negative and we see it in the NBC poll.
If you go hard negative against your opponent, it hurts both of you. Usually the person being attacked takes the brunt of it though. In this case, Clinton started with unusually high negatives and now after going hard negative, the impact is harder on her. The NBC polling demonstrates exactly that tonight. She softened up Obama, but it it only reinforced her weaknesses.
Jerome appears to be completely misreading the polling. It isn’t that Obama is getting killed alone, they are both falling, but she was already closer to the ground.
I agree with you.
That was tongue in cheek by the way 😉
what’s the deal with the oversampling in the NBC poll that Josh Marshall (is talking about?
It’s simple. The sample of 700 voters has 11% African Americans meaning 77 in the sample.
Chuck Todd gives the answer about the oversampling when he says for the crosstabs they oversampled by 100. The overall numbers are with 77 African-Americans. The crosstabs have 177 African-Americans. If you take the percentage by race of whites you will notice that they are 75% of the sample of 700 with is about 525–and the reported white sample is 520. I assume rounding is why there is a difference.
So overall results only include 77 African-Americans. The cross-tabs have 177 African-Americans. It’s all kosher.
Jeralyn should be banned from all further election commentary by the way. Her trying to make sense of the oversample (and admittedly confusing if you don’t do this stuff regularly) was appalling, while also hysterical.
I stopped reading Jeralyn before Super Tuesday and I don’t think it’s worth it to go over there just to laugh at her.
But if she was banned (by the bloggers ethics panel presumably?) from all further election commentary I’d probably go back just to annoy Armando with my argumentative comments 🙂
Thanks for the explanation.
You forget the guy who dabbled in new age weirdness is claiming Martin Marty is just some liberal clown theologian who should bow to Jerome’s moral center.
Fucking hilarious.
It’s clear the MSM isn’t covering the Wright sermons in detail and one of the things blogs are supposed to do is hold them to account when they oversimplify issues. This is a perfect example and now that Trinity finally got long excerpts out, the whining at Taylor Marsh’s and MyDD is nothing short of an extension of the right wing noise machine attacks on the black church.
I’ve been defending Trinity for almost a year now since the wingnut Illinois blogs started in on it, and now I get to add significant chunks of the liberal blogosphere to the problem.
And now that I’m on a rant, her throwing Wright under the bus will have consequences with black preachers and if she were to be the nominee, that would be a very serious problem. Wright isn’t some random guy, he’s a well regarded Minister and known nationally to many black clergy who know him in some respect.
Her throwing him under the bus to white people is going to be very difficult for many black clergy to take.
As I’ve mentioned before, not only is my family deeply religious, but we have a lot of preachers and military chaplains in there. I have relatives who not only attend(ed) Trinity, but have worked with Rev. Wright. These are people who were still warily willing to vote for Clinton if she got the nomination. One of my cousins in Atlanta who had worked with Wright and who the most vocal Clinton supporter in the family sent out an email saying that he was now going to actively promote Obama and that he was done with the Clinton’s. I get a sense from him that the Clinton’s campaign told him and other black preachers one thing then turned around and did this. His email is pretty long and he kept saying that he felt betrayed after their assurances. The email thread is huge and this latest Clinton thing and they’re done.
Funny, I just read this at the source. Glad you put it up. And you’re right about Jerome. His site is on my shitlist of places that aren’t going to get any more traffic from me. Too bad, I really liked reading most of those sites on a daily basis for the last few years.
I don’t care what his pastor said. I don’t care if Obama ever heard it. I don’t care where Obama goes to church or if he doesn’t go to church. I believe in secularism which implies that church and state are separate. I hold to the belief that anyone can practice whatever freaky kind of religion they want to as long as it is not dangerous for me or others. I hold the Constitution in the highest regard and question everyone who wants to sell me their phony patriotism or their particular idea of god and faith.
Listening to CSPAN this morning you may well be on the not just the reasoned side of the view but the popular one as well. Normally, CSPAN callers share a fair amt of Rush L, not this morning. Also, the Ron Paul supporters seem to have jumped over to Obama, forgot to see that one coming.
Two things that illuminate why Obama must be the nominee.
1)Hillary Clinton stating that she would have left that pastor rings as hollow as her lies about Bosnia and NAFTA. It also points out how instrumental all her private assoications are…..if they are not politically advantageous to her, she will dump them.
2) Obama is unique in American politics. He is speaking about a politics of experience, and making all American experience meaningful to all Americans. Any rational human being should be able to understand why African Americans experience of America isn’t the same as that of the class of Americans that the Bush’s come from. But both are American experience and are equally meaningful in who we are. He is attempting to go beyond the politics of distraction, whether it’s flag burning, gay marriage, race as theater like the OJ trial, illegal immigration, etc. None of these distracting issues solve the problems America faces. Getting one’s panties in a bunch over these issues actually prevents anything from getting done, which is precisely why the ruling class in America keeps coming up with them.
I don’t have a link because I’m strapped for time but I know Hillary Clinton’s own pastor (the public one, not the Family shadowy smoke-filled room Dominionist guy she prays with weekly) defended Wright. Of course! 99% of what the guy said is normal stuff in a sane world.
Let’s face it, Obama could be white, middle-aged, never smoked, drank, done drugs, bought real estate from a shady guy, never engaged in homosexual acts, never had sex with anyone but his wife and they’d STILL find a way to personally smear him. If they can Swift Boat John Kerry they can trump up something against anyone, period.
Here’s a question for Clinton supporters: what in the world was Clinton doing sitting down with Richard freaking Scaife’s paper doing an interview? The guy is practically the king of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy and he has to personally fund that piece of crap rag the Tribune out of his own pocket to keep it from going bankrupt. Why in the world would she feel the need to do an interview with him?
Pax
They can, but the attacks against John Kerry weren’t effective because of their nature. They were effective because Kerry was a weak candidate (possibly the second-weakest of all the major candidates in 2004, after Gephardt) and dithered and delayed over concocting a response until it was far too late. Obama’s promptly confronted the smear head-on and, by all appearances, has defeated it to the point where his opponent seems to be destroying her own candidacy with attempts to continue pushing it.
Dean Snyder, the current Senior Minister of Foundry UMC released this statement last week (the Clintons attended the church while J. Philip Wogaman was pastor):
Also, as of a week ago, Cecil Williams was still supporting Hillary. I wonder if he still is:
And she’s written it more eloquently than I did.
Here’s my feeble offering from yesterday in a comment to Fabooj:
I’ve had, and continue to have “issues” with church, but I STILL go back to my home church when we go home. Not every time, but we do.
It’s my husband’s home church, too. I was baptized there. It offered one of my first platforms for public speaking. I sang there. Ushered there. Received scholarships there. We were married there.
Whatever my own personal issues with religion in my life, there are too many people there who were my role models, folks who helped “raise” me, who supported me, encouraged me… I love them. You just don’t walk away from that.
Ironically, it’s this whole mess that has me thinking of going back. If I join a progressive, non “blab it and grab it” place that I don’t have to agree with everything that’s said. I miss the community, and I miss the service to others, though I also have other outlets for community service, too.
And of course, you will be nurtured and supported when you are attacked by stupid people who’ve never had your best interests at heart.
All of these posts are really good to read.
I tend to see issues backwards, in general, but I’ll toss in some more anyway from a complementary (I hope) direction. Not only did the Clinton campaign spit on such an important institution (btw it was a force of resistance against slavery as well), the reasons were just WRONG in so many ways.
I respect people for sitting/bending/kneeling down to pray with people they don’t agree with. I’ve had the great pleasure of attending some Muslim holiday services, and lots of my family is Christian… I figure, if we can’t pray together here, how can we tell ’em to stop fighting over there? Or something.
Congregations that bring together people who do not all vote the same way are probably stronger and truer to their values than ultra-homogeneous ones. So if my junior senator wants to pray with right-wing people, on the face of it, hooray for her.
On the other hand, if she wants to drag some clergymen through the mud for obviously calculating reasons, then the former activities prob’ly don’t reflect some kind of broadminded ecumenism (??) on her part, do they?
The comparison of Rev. Wright’s rather brilliant trope (building the G-d bless America? – no, G-d d-mn America contrast) with pottymouth Imus showed more truth about Sen. Clinton’s values (if I can call them that) than she may have intended to reveal.
Imus attacked individual students, and no it was not brilliant. I teach undergrads right now, and they’re adults, sure, but they’re also kids, and the ones that play varsity sports at a Div I school like Rutgers are pretty d-mn hardworking dedicated kids. Nowhere did Wright trash someone else’s kids, identifiable by name, on public broadcast.
Wright mentioned some truths — with interpretations I might not 100% agree with, sure — but I dunno, I get disgusted with my countrymen when so many people can’t listen to basic truths about ongoing inequality from Stevie Wonder or Grandmaster Flash w/o a fit of the vapors. Then we more-privileged folks are all stunned when NWA says the same thing a bit more bluntly.
Sorry, I’m ranting, and anyone who read all of this and got anything out of it, G-d bless you.
I used to be merely disappointed by HRC; now I’m ashamed of her, and there are many more important things for the country to work on than her “issues”… C’mon Philly…
A former co-worker of mine did her masters’ thesis on the topic of Southern churches’ support for slavery during the Civil war. I’ve been thinking about that topic.
The charges that have been leveled at Wright and Trinity are simply false, in my view. And although I’m more than willing to defend Wright, another way of understanding the charges against him is to examine the roots of those attitudes.
Here’s an interesting article on the subject of Civil war era attitudes in the church, with excepts following.
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-7299529/Slavery-s-champions-stood-at.html
“-Southern clergymen played a prominent role in developing a coherent defense of slavery prior to the Civil War. Under an intensifying assault from Northern antislavery forces, Southern ministers proclaimed that slavery was no sin, but a divine institution ordained by God as the foundation of a Christian society. Proslavery Christians merged a literalist interpretation of the Bible with a paternalistic ideal of the master-slave relationship to create a conservative vision of Southern slavery.”
Some of you may recognize the similarity of this attitude to what George Lakoff calls the “strict father” model.
http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
In fact, one of things Christopher A. Luse explains in the article is that representatives of the Southern church, such as Reverend James Henley Thornwell, found scientific support for slavery objectionable, largely because of the emerging scientific belief that slaves were genetically different beings.
“-He assaulted the ‘science, falsely so-called’ that defended slavery by making ‘the slave a different kind of being from his master.’ Thornwell denounced those “who defend slavery upon the plea that the African is not of the same stock with ourselves…”
Thornwell saw slavery as an institution supported by biblical beliefs, thus scientific support for the idea was unnecessary and even interfered with the biblical justification for slavery.
Luse also dismisses the notion that representatives of the church acted as mere apologists for slavery. Supporters of slavery weren’t simply attempting to reduce cognitive dissonance because of the guilt they felt.
“-Proslavery advocates saw slavery as defining the social relations of the whole South, reinforcing tradition, authority, religious orthodoxy, and political stability. In contrast, they denounced the North as the home of dangerous ‘isms’ such as abolitionism, spiritualism, and socialism. They portrayed Northern ‘Free Society’ as disordered, immoral, and corrupt.”
I could go on, but I trust that you will recognize the similarity between some current attitudes and those that justified slavery.
Several of the national Church bodies split over slavery. It took over 120 years for the northern and southern Presbyterians to reunite (and that was only possible after the fundamentalists left the Southern church over the issue of women’s ordination). In the interim, Black Presbyterian churches in the South were founded by missionaries from the North.
I have heard people opine about the hypocrisy of Northern pastors who demanded after the war that Southern pastors repent of the sin of slavery before the divided church could reunite. It’s helpful to be reminded that (no matter how imperfect Northern pastors were) the Southern pastors weren’t innocent bystanders.
I’ve been in Phoenix this week and I hate that I missed this discussion, but rikyrah is 100% on-point.