Michael C. Dawson: Is Obama Wrong About Wright?

I encourage people to read Michael Dawson’s piece about how Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s views are actually mainstream in the Black community. As a student of African American history, I admire Dawson’s work in the area of political science, in teasing out the various Blackamerican political attitudes and doing work on determining the popularity of different strands of ideology in the Blackamerican community today. See his work “Black Visions.”

“March 17, 2008 — Senator Obama is mistaken. The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who is the Obama family’s pastor and the subject of recent fierce attacks in the media, is not, as Obama has stated, that “he has a lot of the…baggage of those times,” (those times being the 1960s).

The problem is also not, as one paper characterized Obama’s position on his minister, that Wright is stuck in a “time warp,” in a period defined by racial division.

No, the problem is that Wright’s opinions are well within the mainstream of those of black America. As public opinion researchers know, the problem is that despite all the oratory about racial unity and transcending race, this country remains deeply racially divided, especially in the realm of politics.

Most white people and the mainstream media tend to be horrified (in a titillating voyeuristic type of way), when they ‘look under the hood’ to see what’s really on blacks folks’ mind. Two thirds of whites believe that blacks have achieved or will soon achieve racial equality. Nearly eighty percent of blacks believe that racial justice for blacks will not be achieved either in their lifetime or at all in the U.S. In March 2003, when polls were showing strong support among whites for an invasion of Iraq, a large majority of blacks were shown to oppose military intervention.”

Read the whole article here.

UPDATE: You can also read Michael Dawson’s post-Obama speech reaction here.

I actually have a similar attitude towards the preaching of Jeremiah Wright as I do towards that of Minister Farrakhan. I am tremendously excited by what I often hear in their preaching of the true Prophetic tradition, that which is exemplified most clearly in the Qur’an and the Old Testament. It is precisely this element that is most often missing from white Christians, where the liberals and progressives often lack the deep faith which is intrinsic to the Prophetic view of reality and where conservatives believe in what Cornel West calls “Constantinian Christianity” which is a Christianity wedded to embracing and justifying empire and the ruling elites. Of course, because I am a Muslim I have some theological issues with the specifically Christian teachings of Mr. Wright and I take those issues seriously. Also, I think that one sees in Rev. Wright and Minister Farrakhan, at least on occasion another phenomenon which I think can be rightly condemned and which is sometimes not separated out from the true Prophetic teachings that they may also express. That phenomenon is the over simplification of complex realities into charges that are false. Rather than a complex analysis of how the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime” are designed to serve the interests of certain groups and with the knowledge that immense harm will result to other groups, sometimes in the midst of giving a speech such analysis is truncated to specific claims which may be not entirely verifiable or which condemn an entire group as a whole. This is closely related to the type of conspiracy thinking which seeks succinct explanations for complex phenomenon. Many times the fact of a conspiracy is actually real but because it is complex and impossible to understand in all its aspects, it gets boiled down to a simpler conspiracy which distorts reality and may scapegoat certain groups which are vulnerable themselves.

The real point of going through all this is to state that despite the specific aspects which I refer to above which sometimes make me uncomfortable, I would be a million times more uncomfortable listening to a sermon of Constantinian Christianity or its Islamic equivalents. (I hope to outline what I see as being Prophetic Islam and what I see as the equivalent of Constantinian Islam in a future post, inshAllaah). Which is why, in America today, I am most comfortable among Blackamericans and Muslims.

The challenge for Obama is to try to condemn the specifically problematic aspects of Rev. Wright’s sermons without condemning the “Prophetic Christianity” aspects. What most people are actually calling for condemning and what he would probably have to do to become President is to condemn the “Prophetic Christianity” aspects as a whole. But then he would be losing his soul.

Allaah knows best.