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community, where he was admired as a biblical scholar and prophetic minister. My friends in that community urged me to swallow my reservations about Wright and meet with him.
    “Go listen to what Dr. Wright has to say,” one friend told me. “You’re a journalist and Wright has a story that’s a real eyeopener. It’ll cast a whole new light on Obama’s clumsy, crude, and amateurish handling of the greatest crisis in his political career, his public renunciation of the man he once referred to as ‘like my father’—Jeremiah Wright.”

    “After Barack and I got to know each other, it got to the point where he would just drop by my church to talk,” Wright said. “And the talk gradually moved away from his community-organizing concerns—street cleaning, housing, child care, and those kinds of needs—to larger things, more personal things. Like trying to make sense of the world. Like trying to make sense out of the diverse racial and religious background from which he came. He was confused. He wanted to know who he was.
    “And I told him, ‘Well, you already know the Muslim piece of your background,’” Wright continued. “‘You studied Islam, didn’t you?’ And Barack said, ‘Yeah, Rev, I studied Islam. But help me understand Christianity, because I already know Islam.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s start from the beginning. Who do you say Jesus is? Let’s boil it down to the basics.’”
    “Did you convert Obama from Islam to Christianity?” I asked Wright.
    “That’s hard to tell,” Wright replied. “I think I convinced him that it was okay for him to make a choice in terms of who he believed Jesus is. And I told him it was really okay and not a putdown of the Muslim part of his family or his Muslim friends.”

    As a result of his stirring, primetime keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama became an overnight celebrity. His memoir, Dreams from My Father , which had languished on remainder piles in bookstores, rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Suddenly wealthy (his current net worth is estimated at $10.5 million), he and Michelle donated $22,500 to Trinity United Church of Christ in 2006. The following year, as he prepared to throw his hat into the presidential ring, he was still a Trinity congregant, and sometimes attended services where Wright delivered poisonous sermons against whites, Jews, and America.
    Why did Obama remain a member of Trinity?
    Did he agree with what Wright said from the pulpit?
    And if not, how could he sit there and listen to such rubbish?
    “How [can we] reconcile this church membership... with the fact of [Obama’s] own family—his white mother, grandmother, and grandfather?” Shelby Steele wrote in A Bound Man , his brilliant analysis of Obama’s racial identity. “It was not a ‘Black Value System’ that prepared Obama so well for the world. Nor was it ‘black community’ or ‘black family.’ It was not black anything. One could easier argue that his good luck was to be born into a white ‘family,’ ‘community,’ and ‘value system.’ And, in fact, isn’t his success, his ease in the American mainstream, due more to assimilation than to blackness? Isn’t his great advantage over other blacks precisely his exposure from infancy on to mainstream culture? And doesn’t it then follow that assimilation might be a very reasonable strategy for black uplift? And, correspondingly, doesn’t Obama’s success make the precise point that ‘blackness’ is a dead end?”
    When it comes to dealing with the inconvenient truth about Barack Obama’s deep-rooted relationship with Jeremiah Wright, liberals have struggled to find a way to absolve Obama from culpability. Some liberals argue that “buppies” (young, black urban professionals) like Obama flocked to Sunday services at Trinity in order to assuage their feelings of guilt about being better off than the majority of their fellow African-Americans.