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White preachers are given leeway in politics that Jeremiah Wright wasn't. Tools
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AdvertisementI 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.

I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched.

Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a Constitution that proclaimed: "We, the people."

Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.

Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview.

What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle -- forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.

Hardly anyone took the "chickens come home to roost" remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences.

My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright's absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being.

But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.

Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You'll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.

In this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media -- the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content.

So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help -- people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the warmongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins.

But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right.

After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America.

This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it?

Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school.

What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship.

We're often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this -- this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.

Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race.

It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, "beware the terrible simplifiers."

There's an agenda here bitty, most intelligent americans can see thru it, while others need an excuse to not vote for a man of color.

Nice article on an aspect of the whole Wright controversy

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama is moving away from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright so fast he may claim to be an atheist by next weekend. The ongoing sprint from such a polarizing figure is far from a surprise, it's just the timing of it that is so odd.

A New York Times editorial described the recent developments like this:

"In the last few days, in a series of shocking appearances, he [Wright] embraced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism. He said the government manufactured the AIDS virus to kill blacks. He suggested that America was guilty of "terrorism" and so had brought the 9/11 attacks on itself."

Shocking? Every one of these opinions of Wright has been part of the public record for months. It's no more shocking than Angelina Jolie coming out in favor of adoption.

Even in the schizophrenic world of politics, it's unclear how to accomplish the mental gymnastics required to make sense of all of this. The media's love affair with Obama makes them ask us to believe that Obama was courageous for defending Wright in his Philadelphia speech on race and also courageous for throwing him under the bus six weeks later for the exact same opinions.

The only plausible realities are that either the speech was naïve and the press conference realistic, or the speech was pandering and the press conference politically expedient. Neither paints a pretty picture of a politician who is supposed to change Washington.

When the tapes surfaced Obama informed us that much of the controversy had been caused not by Wright's views, but by our lack of understanding about the differences in culture. "Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear."
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It wasn't Wright's overbearing volume, hilarious comedy, hand movements, or dance quality that made me think he was a dangerous peddler of conspiracy theories. It was his words that did that. I don't want someone like him with access to the president for twenty minutes, let alone twenty years.

Those who were outraged by Wright's divisive and destructive comments that preyed on hate have been called racists by many. But, when Obama said he was "outraged" by the "divisive and destructive" comments that gave "comfort to those who prey on hate," he's called brave.

For anyone believing this is about race for Wright's critics, think of disgraced professor Ward Churchill. He was fired for research misconduct from University of Colorado at Boulder and made famous for saying many of the same things as Wright.

If any presidential candidate from either side -- white or black -- had been using Churchill as a "sounding board" for the last twenty years, we would rightly dismiss them.

Obama's political excommunication of Wright is not only a sudden and stark departure from his vaunted Philadelphia speech on race -- it also appears to be retroactive. In his press conference he said about Wright: "I know that one thing that he said was true, that he was never my "spiritual adviser." He was never my spiritual mentor. He was my pastor. And to some extent how the press characterized in the past that relationship, I think, was inaccurate."

Indeed, the press had characterized Wright in that role quite often. For example, the Chicago Sun Times described him as "a close confidant" in an article about people Obama "seeks out for spiritual counsel," and the New York Times described Wright as his "spiritual mentor."

Another source even called Wright the man "who helped introduce" Obama to his "Christian faith," who "counsels" him, is "like family," "a friend," "a great leader" and a "sounding board," who was a member of Obama's spiritual advisory committee and who officiated his wedding and baptized his children.

That source? Barack Obama. I wonder where "the press" got all those crazy ideas.

Do I think for a second that Obama believes the government created the AIDS virus to kill African-Americans? No. But at this point it's rational to wonder whether he is either lying or has an awful sense of judgment. He either knew Wright's views and didn't tell the truth about them, or he somehow missed the core beliefs of the man who was spending his Sunday mornings teaching core beliefs.

I'm glad Obama has come to the same conclusion that Wright's critics came to long ago. I just wonder why it took me two minutes and him two decades.