Bret Ludwig

Tim Wise
Subject: Of National Lies and Racial America

((As Garrett Hardin pointed out, it is often helpful to invert the
terms when presented with an intractible question. The leftist view
presented herein is obviously not mine, but it is fascinating on its
own terms to those who can understand its real significances. One of
those multiple significances is that blacks and whites, even when
speaking what appears to be virtually the same language, can and do
comprehend entirely different meanings to those discussions. That is
not, as "honest conservatives", black and white alike, believe and
state to be merely unfortunate cultural-linguistic disconnects but
because our two peoples are fundamentally different on a neuro-
linguistic level. Without a constant and unnatural system of
continuous revanchism on both parties, the drift is inevitable.
Bret.))

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth
Of National Lies and Racial America

By TIM WISE

>>"For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained
sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much
injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and
genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being
only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the
game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at
righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah
Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally
Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having
brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils
about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned.
It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the
unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones
uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an
"angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of
particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it,
cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be
able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn
it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

<<heavy snip for bandwidth>>

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a
skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either
preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and
have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a
Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in
every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every
children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card
they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about
Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to
who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those
who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact
that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as
to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally
evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many
of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that
theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of
Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question
about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one
accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty
clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.

So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part
is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't
Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted.
That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not
disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because
they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because
they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see
nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their
views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and
their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the
God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the
right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to
be found at Trinity United Church of Christ."<<

((Yes, that's true. Our concept of the God Jeremiah Wright serves is
false, because it is our concept of God, that is to say, the concept
of God as such that is innate to the Western, that is, European, that
is, White mind, whether or not that White mind literally does or does
not believe in God per se. Jeremiah Wright is a Black man and his God
is a Black God, something Whites indeed do not and indeed can not
fully comprehend. Dr. Revilo Oliver understood that concept-indeed,
based a good part of his life's work on that concept- and we need to
as well. Bret.))

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a
Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action:
Racial Preference in Black and White

http://www.counterpunch.com/wise03182008.html
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3864