The Amateur Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sitting in the pews of Trinity, they could shout Amen, brother! when Wright declared: “How do I tell my children about the African Jesus who is not the guy they see in the picture of the blond-haired, blue-eyed guy in their Bible or the figment of white supremacists [sic] imagination that they see in Mel Gibson’s movies?”
    According to Salim Muwakkil, a Chicago journalist, Wright “had the reputation of a militant guy who provided kind of vicarious militance for Chicago’s black elites. So they could get a dose of militance on Sunday and go back home and feel pretty good about doing their part for the black movement.”
    Other liberals have come up with a different theory to explain how Obama could sit week after week in a church that preached white wickedness and black superiority. They argue that it was Michelle Obama, not Barack, who chose Trinity because she wanted to associate with what Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, in his book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America , termed “a small Transcendent [black] elite with such enormous wealth, power, and influence that even white folks have to genuflect.”
    But Jeremiah Wright didn’t buy any of these explanations.
    “Brides like to have their weddings at a church, which is why I think Michelle came to Trinity,” Wright told me. “That’s been my sneaking suspicion, because Michelle didn’t belong to any church when she married Barack. Where have you heard or read about her family raising her in church? My point is—and I haven’t said this publicly to anybody before—but like you talk about Toni Morrison, you talk about Maya Angelou, you talk about these black women, they grew up in a church, most of them. Michelle didn’t. She grew up in a kind of Jack and Jill middle income, completely middle-class environment.
    “And even after Barack and Michelle came to the church,” Wright went on, “their kids weren’t raised in the church like you raise other kids in Sunday school. No. Church is not their thing. It never was their thing. Michelle was not the kind of black woman whose momma made her go to church, made her go to Sunday school, made her go to B.Y.P.U [Baptist Young People’s Union]. She wasn’t raised in that kind of environment. So the church was not an integral part of their spiritual lives after they got married.
    “But”—and here Wright paused for emphasis—“the church was an integral part of Barack’s politics . Because he needed that black base.”

    The conflict between church and state—between Jeremiah Wright’s racist brand of religion and Barack Obama’s “postracial” brand of politics—came to an inevitable head on February 9, 2007. That was the day before Obama planned to launch his presidential campaign from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois—a move aimed at associating himself with Springfield’s most famous citizen, Abraham Lincoln. Wright was scheduled to deliver the invocation, but several days before the event, Rolling Stone magazine published a devastating profile of Barack Obama’s minister.
    “Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States,” the Rolling Stone piece said.
    “Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college,” he intones. “Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!” There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. “We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS.... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people.... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!” The crowd whoops and amens as Wright