Obama "Sells Off" His Faith?

From NewsOne.com

OP-ED
Obama Drops Trinity, Cheapens His Faith
By Mark Anthony Neal

This election cycle has been notable for the pressures on Senator Barack Obama to come clean about his faith. This past weekend, in the aftermath of guest preacher Father Michael Pfleger, who is white, recently mocking Senator Hillary Clinton in Trinity United's pulpit, Obama resigned his membership. This move raises critical questions about Obama's integrity given his willingness to cut ties with an institution that was so clearly integral to his life as a public servant.

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Premature Autopsies for the Race Man

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

"Premature Autopsies" for the Unrepentant Race Man (ver. 1.0)
by Mark Anthony Neal

On his 1989 recording, Majesty of the Blues, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis paid tribute to the legacy of New Orleans Jazz. The centerpiece of the recording was a three-part suite called "The New Orleans Function." Arranged as a traditional New Orleans funeral on the occasion of "The Death of Jazz," the suite features a 16-minute sermon aptly titled "Premature Autopsies." Though "Premature Autopsies" was written by noted Jazz critic and curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, it is none other than the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who delivers the sermon on the recording. While Reverend Wright was largely unknown to most in America only two months ago, at the time he recorded "Premature Autopsies" he was already regarded among the black cultural vanguard as one of Black America's--if not America's--greatest preachers.

Like the music that Marsalis "recreated" for Majesty of the Blues, Reverend Wright's preaching was the embodiment of what some might call "classical" Black American Culture--easily recalling examples like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Louis Armstrong, Mahailia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, the latter whom serves as the primary referent throughout "Premature Autopsies." Crouch composed "Premature Autopsies," in response the sense that classical Black American Culture was under assault in the marketplace and by a dismissive generation of young Americans. The sermon gives the strongest inkling to what drives Crouch's very public criticisms of rap music and hip-hop culture. But I also submit that the passion with which Reverend Wright delivers the sermon also explains the sense of indignity that was on display during the Q&A portion of Wright's recent talk at the National Press Club.

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Steal This Election? Bakari Kitwana on Media Coverage of Obama

from NewsOne.com

Steal this Election
by Bakari Kitwana

If the year 2000 belongs to the Supreme Court, then 2008 belongs to the media. This year will go down as the one when the mainstream media worked over time to sabotage the Democratic primary.

For months, Senator Barack Obama has been the undisputed frontrunner. Even before this week’s decisive primary races in Guam, North Carolina and Indiana, he was ahead in the delegates count (1748 as compared to Clinton’s 1609, according to realclearpolitics.com).

He’s been ahead by a comfortable margin in the popular vote. He’s raised more money than anyone, with no sign of letting up. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s ignited record youth voter turnouts in one state after another all year.

By now, in any other election, the Democratic Party would have strongly encouraged the losing candidate to concede. The only logical reason why they haven’t—especially since Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning—is because Party leaders don’t want to accept Obama as their candidate. The party’s failure to accept the front-runner has created an opening for the media to take him down.

Because of decisions made in elite newsrooms, for six weeks the nation’s attention has been focused on the pastor of the frontrunner. The magnitude of coverage for someone on the periphery of a major election, such as Wright, is unprecedented.

Let’s be clear: the media gave Jeremiah Wright national coverage for a speech at the NAACP convention the day after a heavily publicized PBS appearance. In recent history, I don’t ever recall the media giving ‘breaking news’ live coverage to any Black Civil Rights organization. Even President Bill Clinton’s 1992 chastisement of Sista Souljah at the Rainbow Coalition gathering was witnessed via played back sound bites.

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John L. Jackson, Jr.: Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright

The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated May 16, 2008

Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright
By JOHN L. JACKSON JR.

In the 1950s and 1960s, "consensus historians" such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a "paranoid style" of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That "sick" style was concerned with "the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content." Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on the African-American community by the U.S. government exemplifies the extent to which paranoia —racial paranoia, in particular — continues to play a powerful role in our politics.

The civil-rights movement succeeded in outlawing legal discrimination and driving explicit racism to the margins of society. But in many respects, racism has simply gone underground. Today it is usually subtle, making it more difficult to identify. Of course, recent studies demonstrate that black people still have a harder time than white people (even with identical credentials) when it comes to buying new homes or cars or landing lucrative jobs. According to some social scientists, those differences aren't just about white prejudice. They are also related to institutional and structural realities like housing patterns and the reliance on market forces in hiring that perpetuate racial differences as a byproduct of seemingly colorblind social policies.

When racism was explicit and legal, there was less need for African-Americans to be paranoid about it. For the most part, what they saw was what they got. Racists could be unabashed about their feelings, and politicians could blatantly vow, like George Wallace, to fight for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

With the social advances of the 1960s, African-Americans have become increasingly secure in their legal citizenship, but they are less confident about determining when they are being victimized by silent and undeclared racism. Racial paranoia characterizes the post-civil-rights generation of "affirmative-action babies." They are young black people for whom legal segregation is a glimpse at black-and-white images in a PBS documentary. But they also have a sneaking suspicion that somehow the smallest slights and the most trivial of gestures may be a telltale sign of what has been called "two-faced racism" — hidden racial animus dressed up to look politically correct. Such uncertainty gives rise to paranoia, especially if we stubbornly fail to discuss racism's newfangled subtleties.

What do I mean by racial paranoia? It describes the suspicions black people have whenever, say, an idle white salesperson at their local drugstore sees them beckoning with a question but ignores them anyway. Or when that salesperson takes a few seconds longer than needed to sigh himself into an unenthusiastic response. Insignificant, I know — petty, even. More hollow bourgeois angst. But when talking about race and racism, we shouldn't underestimate the potential significance of seemingly inconsequential acts.

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John L. Jackson Jr. is an associate professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, was published this spring by Basic Civitas. He blogs as Anthroman

Guest Post! William Jelani Cobb on The Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah's Failed Crusade
by William Jelani Cobb

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Jeremiah Wright has just been awarded a construction contract. And that's the best case scenario -- in light of his weekend blitz of media appearances there are many doubting that Wright's intentions were benign. Assuming they were, the reverend's appearance before the National Press Club highlighted his naive belief that he could redeem his reputation by talking to the same people responsible for distorting it.

Let's be clear: Wright has been wildly mischaracterized and defamed. His comments may have been incendiary but the were largely taken out of context. Even his more controversial views coexist with a generally well-informed view of American society. It's also natural instinct to respond to the kind malice that has been directed at him for the past six weeks. You see a fire, you want to throw water on it. But this situation is more akin to a grease fire, which means that you have to respond to it in a way that runs counter to your instincts. Instead, Wright opened the faucets and the flames have spread far beyond their original boundaries.

In the wake of his press club appearance you heard disparate rumblings that are growing into a chorus of condemnation. The difference is that these jeers are now coming from black people. He started out with the enmity of misinformed whites who knew him only through the manipulated soundbites that had been looped ad nauseum (but which were, until now, dying down.) But now he has done nothing to diminish their scorn and has gained the contempt of a growing number of black folk who feel that he has single-handedly ruined our chance to have a black president.

That perspective isn't accurate, but it is increasingly common only a day after that appearance. Writing in the NY Times, Bob Herbert accused Wright of vengefully sabotaging Obama with the press conference yesterday; Errol Louis in the Daily News gave Wright the benefit of the doubt and said that "He couldn't have done more damage to Obama if he tried." I received an email from a friend who referred to it as "black-on-black crime" another speculated that he was secretly on Hillary Clinton's payroll. And then there are the innumerable crabs-in-a-barrel references cycling around the internet. I'm not prepared to say that Wright was out to destroy Obama's candidacy (though that may well be the outcome) but it was entirely predictable that people would draw that conclusion.

It has to be unspeakably difficult to hear oneself lambasted and defamed for weeks on end but Wright entered that conference with a flawed agenda: the commercial media exists to exacerbate controversies, not defuse them. The degree of truth in his words was nearly irrelevant; what matters is the way in which those words would inevitably be consumed, filtered, repackaged and distributed. If the mainstream media operated on the basis of people's good intentions we would probably have far more mutual understanding and they would have far less money. This might have been minimized had Wright called Roland Martin, Ed Gordon, Gwen Ifill and done a roundtable of responsible black journalists or sat down with Amy Goodman or even given it a rest after the Bill Moyers interview he did days earlier. But in addressing the National Press Club the reverend was like a man who had already lost $1000 to a card hustler but decides to play again – double or nothing.

Wright was also likely buoyed by a false confidence in his own communication skills. He is a brilliant preacher but a podium is not a pulpit. He has spent the last 36 years in an arena where people literally say "amen" to your opinions, one where your credibility is virtually unquestionable. But yesterday he was talking to journalists, people who are, by definition, skeptical and start with the premise that if someone in public is talking, there's a good chance they're telling a lie. Anything Wright said was grist for the machine. He was playing an away game without recognizing that he lost home field advantage the minute he left his pulpit. Anything he said beyond "Jesus loves you" would be used against him.

It's been argued that Wright felt Obama threw him under the bus with his Philadelphia race speech, but a moment's reflection would reveal that those words constituted anything but a political stiff-arm. In Philadelphia Obama offered as subtle and daring a defense of Wright as he could have and far more than any other politician would have given in the situation. (Jocelyn Elders and Lani Guinier were dispatched by Bill Clinton for offenses far, far less damaging than Wright's video clips have been to Obama.)

The irony is that less than twenty-four hours later Wright got to see what a real denunciation looks like. Obama has been painted into a corner, in large measure a victim of his own attempt to place Wright into context. It looks all but certain that Wright will be looked at by a large segment of black America as the man who tried to ruin a dream. It will be a vast distortion of Wright's distinguished legacy but its what people will believe.

And, as any one of the media in the room could have told him, perception is reality. Jeremiah Wright has a lot of explaining to do. And that probably means that the worst is yet to come.

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William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at Spelman College. He specializes in post-Civil War African American history, 20th century American politics and the history of the Cold War. He is also a contributing writer for Essence magazine, an essayist and fiction writer and the author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (NYU Press 2007) as well as The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). He is editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader, which was listed as a 2002 Notable Book of The Year by Black Issues Book Review. Cobb is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the 5th Congressional District in Georgia.