Skinner's post today (
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x5390482) provided one view on the Wright / MLK connection. In considerable detail, A brilliant Sociology Professor from Georgetown also discussed the
context of Wright's sermons not only through the lens of MLK, but biblical discourse and prophecy as well. Link on Professor Dyson:
http://aalbc.com/authors/michaelericdyson.htm (or:
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=25509 )
I strongly encourage you to listen to the entire interview, excellent insight into MLK's self-eulogization, its historical context, and its ramifications ever since.
link here, a recording of the interview is on the top of the page:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/04/the_40th_anniversary_of_kings.htmlSource: Talk on the Nation with Neal Cohen (one of my favorite shows on NPR); April 3, 2008.
This is just one portion on Wright. Read it. Think for yourself. Respond objectively and sincerely about Wright. If you don't, if I can have anything to do with it, you should never be allowed to complain about this topic on DU again---even if it means I have to keep kicking my own thread into perpetuity and linking you to it to request a response (jk., though I will be posting this as a journal).
Note: objective discourse respectfully requested in this thread. Opposing viewpoints are welcome, but please base them on reason and interpretation, grounded in evidence, and warranted by historical, sociological, and political circumstances. I agree completely with Skinner: "Inflammatory yes, anti-American, you be the judge." To that I'd add, what do you think about the purview, the purpose, and the purport you see here? ...
<snip>
LEON (caller) : But having said that, I know what the focus of the program is today. I appreciate that, especially from NPR. but I would love to hear Dr. Dyson compare some of the messages and themes of Dr. King to those of Jeremiah Wright. I think people are – in this hour, were not recognizing the black church – the ignorance about the black church nationally is showing itself. The ignorance about how black patriotism is manifest is showing itself. I love to have Dr. Dyson speak to that.
Dr. DYSON: Yes, sir. Well, thank you so much, first of all, for your remembrances of Dr. King and for the extraordinary character and timbre of those memories because they speak about a personal investment that is so moving. Yet, there’s no question that if there were YouTube – if YouTube existed when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to black churches, he would be considered every bit as controversial as Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
First of all, your point is exactly right that there is a profound and pervasive ignorance about the black church. People said, well, we didn’t know when we saw Jeremiah Wright on the YouTube that black people do that in their churches, that they get political.
It’s not about the gospel. It’s not about Holy Ghost. it’s not about theological dispensation or grace. It’s about politics. Then, you say, well, white brothers and sisters, what you don’t understand is the racism of the white church led to the founding of the black church. If it were not for white churches subordinating theology to their politics, then the black church and the white church would never have split. They would have never been but one church. But because white brothers and sisters, who were Christian, refused to accommodate through their own theology and their sanctuaries, black believers, they had to jettison from – you know, they were jettisoned from the white church. They left the white church. They started their own.
And so, now that they’ve left, you know, a couple of 103 years ago, they started they own traditions. And they speak freely and bravely and courageously about the conditions of their birth. And the birth of the black church was in racism. And the birth of the black church was in politics - so black preachers necessarily and understandably of the prophetic mode.
Now, that’s not a majority tradition within an African-American culture. Let me not lie that it’s not the major religious tradition within black culture, but it is the most significant one and it’s the most influential one. It’s the one out of which Martin Luther King Jr. sprang.
Henry Highland Garnet, Reverdy Ransom were among the many ministers - Frederick Douglass, even Booker T. Washington was a minister. But they came out a tradition that said we must speak truth to power. We must represent the interest of African-American people. Black churches are not only for speaking the gospel. They’re for organizing education. They’re for organizing unions. They’re for teaching people about their history. They’re about educating human beings. It’s a social center as well as a gathering place to articulate the grievances of black existence and its glories as well.
So when you understand it that way, you will put Jeremiah Wright into context. Listen to these. Martin Luther King Jr. said to a black church a couple of months before he died, America is the greatest war criminal in the world. We have committed more war crimes than any of the nation.
He also said at one point, I will refuse to tell young black men to put down their guns and their weaponry without speaking to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, America.
He also said that I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be on the reservation. I’ve been on the reservation too long, and America would treat us like they’ve treated the Japanese and put us in concentration camps.
And finally, he said that America began in genocide. Now, if YouTube were around, people would say, how dare you say these dastardly things about the American government? How dare you be anti-patriotic an un-American? And yet, because he loved the country enough, he told the truth.
Prophetic anger is central to the black church tradition of rebelling against social evils manifest at the level of racism. And Jeremiah Wright is part and parcel, woof and warp of that tradition. He extends that tradition, and I think you cannot extract a person’s comments out of context. You’ve got to put them into their broader context and understand what his sermon was about, what black preaching has done for black America, and how the prophetic black leader has been the freest black person in America. Why? Because he, mostly - was he a patriarchal project - was not behold into white money. The black minister was being paid by black people.
Therefore, the black minister could afford to say stuff that a lot of other black people felt but could never say. The caller said his father couldn’t even grieve. When Joe Louis used to beat up on white opponents, many black people weren’t even allowed the opportunity to celebrate publicly, lest their glee be taken as a denunciation of white identity. The Blackpool Pit was the place where grief and glory and anger and frustration could be articulated.
Let me end by saying this: No prophet, whether Jeremiah in the Bible or Jeremiah Wright, Amos, Hosea, are very, you know, balanced people in terms of, you know, of their language. They are hyperbolic. They are rhetorically gifted in a way to indict the prevailing forms of oppression.
Their purpose on life and in their congregations is to remind people of what does say of the Lord. And if you think Jeremiah Wright was rough, go back and read the Bible. Oh, God will pull down your nation, tear it up, read the psalms, which are the gangster rap of their time. Oh, my Lord, destroy my enemies, kill their mothers, and by the way, bless me too.
This is not a pretty affair. So people unfamiliar with prophetic tradition make those statements. I think Jeremiah Wright represents the heart of that tradition and so does, by the way, Martin Luther King Jr.
<note: part of a much longer interview and show; portions edited out to meet the copyright rules.>
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