I have been waiting to post on this subject for a long while, hoping that the right words would suddenly come to me in my sleep. Unfortunately, the words I have been searching for have not yet come to me, and I can wait no longer.
The clips that have repeatedly played in the media depict Reverend Wright as a hate-mongering antipatriot, but this portrayal could not be further removed from the truth. All Americans owe it to themselves and to this now demonized man to watch the speeches in their entirety. Removed from their context, I find it understandable that people might find his remarks offensive, but Rev. Wright’s remarks aren’t nearly so inflammatory when placed back into the context of the larger speeches he was giving. The quote “Not God bless America. God damn America.” is simply wrong. The actual quote is expanded: “God damn America as long as America acts like she is God and she is supreme.” Even this quote is still out of context because the speech notes the comparative difference between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, noting that Bill Clinton was a largely positive force in an era of bad times, but that George W. Bush asserted America’s supremacy over God’s supremacy. Rev. Wright concludes that it is that assertion of America’s supremacy that is damnable.
The other statement that Rev. Wright has been often reported as saying is that America brought 9/11 on itself. Once again this statement was taken entirely out of context. He was actually quoting Ambassador Peck, a white man, who had appeared on Fox News to say “America’s chickens had come home to roost.” The Ambassador’s meaning was clear, he did not mean that America had brought 9/11 on itself, he simply meant that America should not have been surprised that there were people in the world who were angry with us, and that our actions in other part of the world have consequences. 9/11 was the reaction of a militant group to actions that we had taken. 9/11 was a vile act, but it did not happen in isolation. We cannot, and should not, avoid stepping on every toe in our diplomatic relationships across the globe, but we should have known that our actions have made numerous people across the globe angry at our country. This is what Rev. Wright was saying, and he goes on to urge us not to take our own anger out on innocent civilians, as we have so many times in the past.
When you watch these videos in full, it becomes apparent that the Reverend has been treated in a manner that is both unfair and unjust to who he is as a man and as an American. Rev. Wright had been in the Marines, he had fought for this nation. Now we will parse his speeches for a few painful seconds of material and turn our collective backs on this man?
I thought Obama’s speech on race was fantastic, but he did not go nearly far enough in exonerating his religious mentor. Obama remarked that the mistake that Rev. Wright made was not that he was angry about the past, but that he lacked an ability to see the capacity for the country to make positive changes. By making these remarks, Obama bought into the narrative that the media had manufactured about Rev. Wright. What Rev. Wright’s speeches actually portray is an America that can both progress and regress, a dynamic America whose citizens must rely on each other because the government is prone to corruption and abuse. For the sin of accepting a forced narrative rather than asserting an honest counter-narrative, Obama owes Rev. Wright an apology.
