This morning I did a Google search for “Jeremiah Wright, who broke the story?” Apparently, there are as many answers to my question as aspiring claimants to various sorts of notoriety. Suffice it to say that everybody under the sun is taking credit for, or is credited with, having made the Wright sound bites available. And as is usual when things go viral on the .net, a kind of vicious reduction has taken place. Pastor Wright has been objectified as a small collection of sound bites, endlessly played. What interests me today is that almost everybody, including Barack Obama, seems to believe that there is an agreed set of cultural norms that Wright has violated, a border that his language has stepped across so that Wright is on one side of an American fence like the one going up along our southern perimeter. Wright has now had to cancel several appearances and speaking engagements, as the objectification has continued.

I think if I were Wright I might get myself some really good lawyers and go after these media types. Wright isn’t a candidate for public office. He has been co-opted into a political campaign for nefarious purposes. He has been knowingly and maliciously misrepresented and mischaracterized. It doesn’t matter that his own words have been used against him in the snippets of memetic imagery that are used to represent him. Snippets such as these invite the supplying of a context, and while many have praised Obama for his speech in response to the phenomenon, most have continued to deprecate Wright. How bad the deprecation can get is perhaps illustrated by the remarks of Victor Davis Hanson and Pat Buchanan. But it’s really not useful merely to point out that Buchanan and Hanson’s claims are racist. They are — but that’s almost beside the point.

On the other hand, the trouble with Wright’s hyperbolic gestures is that they reflect such extreme claims for recognition of (and respect for) group identity that they reify it. And the trouble with that reification and the attendant oversimplification of complex issues, is that they “encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism,” as Nancy Fraser puts it in a recent New Left Review article. Still, those who are bothered by Wright’s alleged anti-Americanism etc., might want to take a look at the New Testament: Matthew 23, for instance, where Jesus utters a long rant against the authorities of his people and its principle city, foretelling their destruction by divine retribution for their sins. Jesus’ rants (this one and others) are well within the tradition of prophetic preaching already established in his time, as are Pastor Wright’s. Whether such rants are useful in a social situation seeming to call for cross-racial dialogue, or whether they will help Barack Obama get elected, are separate issues. But Pastor Wright is not a racist or a traitor to his country as he is being portrayed.

And it should be remembered that Pastor Wright is not addressing Barack Obama’s audience in these remarks that have been so widely disseminated. He is addressing a congregation of Americans whose ancestors were brought to these shores via the middle passage. Indeed the long history of the black church in America is not irrelevant here. A few years ago I visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, bombed in 1963 by KKK members. There is in the basement of that historic church a fairly large model of a slave ship, intended for use by Sunday School children. In my West Texas Methodist Sunday School, no slave ships were part of any narrative I was asked to assimilate, not even when we sang “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . . ” –that was about personal salvation.

Some days before my beloved and I traveled to Birmingham, I had taken a walk down Arsenal Street here in my home town of St. Louis, where race is important–you better believe it. As I was walking, a young black woman came walking towards me with a small child I assume was her daughter. They were chatting and laughing until the mother saw me coming, whereupon she grabbed the child up in her arms and hurried past me, her face averted, no eye contact. The model slave ship at 16th Street Baptist Church marks the real border that divides black and white Americans. The members of that historic congregation in Birmingham, like the members of Trinity UCC, Chicago, like Pastor Wright and the young woman I passed on Arsenal Street, are on one side of that border; and the majority of mainstream Americans are on the other. That’s why Obama had to disown Wright to the extent that he did.

An interesting and persuasive view of Wright, in some ways contrary to mine, is that of Jonetta Rose Barras, who, in a Washington Post piece entitled “He’s Preaching to A Choir I’ve Left,” seems to express enough good will to wipe out the border I have described. “[T]oday,” she says:

there is an entire generation of young people who know nothing of segregation, who see one another as individuals, not as symbols of a dark past. They do not look into white faces and see, as I once did, a burning cross, a white sheet and a vicious dog on a police officer’s leash. This is the coalition pushing for a new America.

Barras’ optimism and good sense give me hope, just as Obama does. If I’m not so optimistic as she is, perhaps that is because segregation and Jim Crow have shaped my life as surely as they shaped the lives of African Americans of my generation. I’m on the other side of the border from Pastor Wright, though I have spent well-nigh sixty years trying to overcome the fact. We were both of us born into a racist society that assigned us to two different categories, and regardless of what friendships we may have or how we may seek to practice good will and love, we remain in those categories. Our racist culture permits nothing else.

If I’m not so optimistic, perhaps it’s because I understand why Obama had to disown Wright. It isn’t just that what Barras calls Wright-speak is “harmful and ultimately can’t provide healing” and is “outdated in the 21st century,” and Obama had to reject that. It’s that Obama had to betray somebody I believe he loves in order to remain within certain norms that have shaped his campaign from the beginning, some of which are the norms of institutionalized racism. Hanson, to whom I allude above, suggests that Obama get himself a 4×4 flag lapel pin and that Michelle Obama conclude every appearance with a chorus of “God Bless America” from now on; and if Hanson means to be funny, the butt of the joke is not the collective of white, working-class Democrats.

So perhaps it’s OK if some of us, who like Pastor Wright are hanging up our spikes and leaving the race to wonderful young folks like Barras — perhaps it’s OK if we hope that Obama will not back down from his limited defense of Jeremiah Wright and will spare the rest of us some space to defend his mentor a bit more enthusiastically than he has done.

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