Bill Moyers: Jeremiah Wright, Double Standards & The Media

[babylonsister]

Bill Moyers: Jeremiah Wright, Double Standards & The Media
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 05/04/2008 @ 8:17pm


Beware the Terrible Simplifiers

By Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers Journal

May 3, 2008


I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: 'Who's telling the truth over there?'

'Everyone,' he said. 'Everyone sees what's happening through the lens of their own experience.'

That's how people see Jeremiah Wright.

In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage.

More than 2,000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: 'Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American- hating radical,' one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a 'nut case.'

Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club.

A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist.

Many black preachers I've known-scholarly, smart, and gentle in person-uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the South, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.

more...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/317800

[earthlover]

1. Gee....I thought black people like Obama were lucky to be born black....

and that is why they succeed so well. Sorry, Geraldine.

Great article by Moyers. Thanks

[jwirr]

2. I did not watch his interview with Wright. Does anyone know why

Bill asked in on in the first place?

[LuckyLib]

3. Once again, Moyers sums it up. Crazy white Christians are dismissed with a wave of the hand.

Rev Wright? Used to vilify Obama.