Dwayne Monroe -clip-
About the Obama/Wright brouhaha, Charles Brown wrote:
...how tragic that Rev. Wright (a follower of Jesus, whose story emphasized forgiveness ) didn't use this opportunity to let his anger go ( he had adequately expressed it and correct criticisms of America), and make a speech on racial reconciliation and forgiveness; take his lead from Obama. Sure it's true that US has had Indian genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, etc. But is there any future in treating racism as permanent? The profound hope of O's campaign is once again dreaming Martin Luther King's dream, without denying history.
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Which, on the face of it, seems reasonable. If you look more closely however, questions arise.
^^^^ CB: Well, lets take a deeper look.
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Charles -- like many others -- assumes that Wright's challenge to, and unflinching description of white supremacy and imperial violence comes from little else than "anger". ^^^ CB: Not really. I have written more against US imperialism here abouts than just about anybody else. You should be able to reason from that that I know Wright is right on the basic issues he mentions, that there is reason as well as anger in his speech.
^^^
In fact, it's the core of a consistent and well reasoned *liberation theology* response to ongoing forms of oppression. Like Charles, many commentators are saying that Wright, as a follower of Christ, should stop mentioning American sins and, adhering to Sen. Obama's 'vision', focus on 'hope' and 'reconciliation'. (Ironically, many of these newborn theologians are otherwise unconcerned about the finer points of Christian thought).
^^^^ CB: So, you think this is my first encounter with *liberation theology*. Detroit is the home of The Shrine of the Black Madonna. Ever heard of Albert Cleague ? I think Rev. Robert Wolfe gave me a copy of Cone's book in about 1978. There was a liberation theologist in the Sandinista government in the 1980s. I wrote a paper on Jesus' law of love ( "the greatest commandment) in law school in 1979. M L King was a lib theologist and practitioner. One of the local radio talk show hosts told us about Rev. Wright and Obama about a year ago. You do know that Rev. Wright spoke at the Detroit NAACP dinner before he spoke at the press conference. I know about liberation theology and Jesus as a revolutionary.
Yea, at that moment , it would have been tactically smart to ease up in the denunciation of sins. We had sufficient Wrighteous indignation, with "Goddamn America ". That was very sufficient and true.
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This is an attractive argument if, for no other reason, because obeying its reasoning would ruffle far fewer feathers. But it's a plea to put a fresh coat of paint on a neglected and decaying building: covering the glaring evidence of trouble without actually fixing a thing.
^^^^^ CB: No, it is recognition that the neglected and decaying building had been very adequately exposed. The proposal wasn't to take back his criticisms, but to show the other side. Jesus got real angry and critical of the Roman imperialist system and Israeli compradors, too. (Threw the money changers out of the temple , physically) But then he had that strong theme of forgiveness. He's famous for saying "love thine enemies", quite a remarkable tactic. M L King denounced the wrongs of America heavily, and then extended a hand of unity at the same time.
Americans are not moving to a better politics based on denunciations from Black liberation theologists; or better said, white America seems to have reached the limit as to how far it will moved based on denunciation by righteous anger ( and it _is_ truly righteous; don't get me wrong). We Black liberationist have been denouncing America's sins for decades. We have lots of empirical evidence that it just isn't moving them anymore. Affirmative action is dead.
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This is precisely the opposite of the revolutionary message of Jesus which even a secularist such as myself can eagerly applaud. Indeed, as Crossan's "God and Empire..." asserts, Christ's goal was to supplant the brutal Roman world with the 'kingdom of heaven' through peaceful means.
^^^^ CB: See above on Jesus as revolutionary , and the Roman empire and Israeli kingdom.
Engels interprets The Book of Revelation (where the rapture is) as a code for a slave revolt against the Romans.
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Fundamentalists typically describe this replacement as being achieved via the 'second coming' or the rapture (events which, paradoxically for people who often talk about peace, are enthusiastically anticipated because of the punishing violence thought to accompany them). Crossan argues that Christ was talking about a more earthly, less cosmically explosive, but no less dramatic process: the imperial system was to be undone, step by step, via the unprecedented creation of a new paradigm, centered on love. By its very nature, Christ's vision of mutual aid and submission to one another was a challenge to Roman concepts of harsh competition, martial virtue and 'peace' via war and subjugation (wasn't it Tacitus who said, "where they [Rome] make a desert, they call it peace"?).
^^^^ CB: Engels' essay on the Biblical text as organizing an earthly revolt is from the late 1800's . Does Crossan site Engels ? ^^^^^
Bringing this back to Obama/Wright, we can see that our modern Rome cannot be transformed into something better by whitewashing the truth about its nature. To be faithful to not only Christ's message but his deeper goal, you cannot shrink from calling the invasion of Iraq a crime. You cannot settle for saying, as most people do, that it was merely a 'mistake'. Would Jesus be so careful? The trouble is, when you say 'crime' instead of 'mistake' you're vulnerable to charges of radicalism and wild-eyed anger.
^^^^ CB: Wright already told the truth about the US empire. Radicalism would definitely lose the presidential race for Barry, so it would be pretty nonsensical for Barry to suddenly go radical; and Wright knows it. So, at certain points , as Jesus says , "you're either with me or agin' me". Barry is using a different tactic, and Wright knew it.
^^^ And this is what Rev. Wright has done and why he has been vilified; he has used the word 'crime' where it should be used. He has called 'supremacy by its right name instead of covering it with sugar. During his Natl. Press Club speech, the Reverend said:
<snip>
I call our faith tradition, however, the prophetic tradition of the black church, because I take its origins back past [theologian] Jim Cone, past the sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the transatlantic slave trade. I take it back past the problem of Western ideology and notions of white supremacy.
I take and trace the theology of the black church back to the prophets in the Hebrew Bible and to its last prophet, in my tradition, the one we call Jesus of Nazareth.
The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive. Liberating the captives also liberates who are holding them captive.
It frees the captives and it frees the captors. It frees the oppressed and it frees the oppressors.
The prophetic theology of the black church, during the days of chattel slavery, was a theology of liberation. It was preached to set free those who were held in bondage spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes physically. And it was practiced to set the slaveholders free from the notion that they could define other human beings or confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel.
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^^^^^ CB: Great and true stuff, but now's not the time to emphasize that. ( You know the psalm with "For everything there is a season " ?) Masses of Americans are not going to hear Wright and rise up and overthrow imperialism. That's reality, brother, based on many years of testing liberation theological sermons on them, lots of empirical evidence. So, the sole effect of Wright saying that now would be to damage Barry's campaign.
The only reason so many people were listening to Wright was because of his connection to Obama. Don't use Obama's campaign to get _your_ message out, especially if it is not Obama's message.
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and later,
God's desire is for positive, meaningful and permanent change. God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people. God does not want the powerless masses, the poor, the widows, the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society.
God's desire is for positive change, transformation, real change, not cosmetic change, transformation, radical change or a change that makes a permanent difference, transformation. God's desire is for transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders, and changed hearts in a changed world.
This principle of transformation is at the heart of the prophetic theology of the black church. These two foci of liberation and transformation have been at the very core of the black religious experience from the days of David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, and Sojourner Truth, through the days of Adam Clayton Powell, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Barbara Jordan, Cornell West, and Fanny Lou Hamer.
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These aren't the words of a man who's trapped by "anger" but rather, the words of a man who is challenging his country to face its actual self, to cast away its cherished mythology of perfection, and move forward.
^^^^ CB: Yea, I just saw a tv documentary on Ida B. Wells. She's my current Black history special one.
^^^^
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Sen. Obama's objective is to become president of the United States, the nation which to this day remains, to quote Dr. King, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world..." A POTUS' job, stripped of distracting pomp and circumstance, is to act as manager of a vast system of power preservation and expansion. Just as Augustus (who Gibbon called, "that crafty tyrant"), though remaining faithful to the ideas energizing Roman tyranny, was a better, less destructive emperor than Nero, Obama -- if elected -- may yet prove to be a better, and perhaps even less destructive, manager than his competitors.
^^^ CB: If he wins, hopefully, he'll be more like Abe Lincoln or FDR or US Grant, than a Roman Emperor.
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That's important, and a reasonable rationale for supporting his candidacy. Still, even as we gift Sen. Obama with more benefit of the doubt than his opponents (and this generosity must be interrogated) we should heed Christ's admonition, stated in Matthew 10:16 - "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (KJV).
Those of us who're calling upon Rev. Wright to be quiet or, at best, to parrot Obama's rhetoric of 'reconciliation' over and above the more thorough, liberation theology vision of 'transformation' are -- whether we realize it or not -- demanding that he split Jesus' advice in two: retaining the dove's harmlessness while losing the serpent's wisdom.
^^^^ CB: Not really. More like get with the strategy O is employing.
.d.
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