> Of National Lies and Racial America
>
> By Dr. TIM WISE
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html
>
> 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.
>
> Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all,
> didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't
> he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because
> of its treatment of the African American community throughout the
> years?
>
> Well actually, no he didn't.
>
> Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but
> that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of
> chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of
> the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive
> good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes
> around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological
> grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than
> enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit
> hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack
> on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
>
> He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians
> in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted
> an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst
> sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence
> of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most
> definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the
> act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks
> were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save
> American lives."
>
> But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are
> inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one
> supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also
> ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own
> war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already
> signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going
> to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The
> conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its
> basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we
> committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no
> justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more
> hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses
> than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're
> the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because,
> you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once
> said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States
> of America. I don't care what the facts are."
>
> And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He
> was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation
> that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons
> undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up
> hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug
> possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according
> to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking
> around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what
> God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or
> shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping
> with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely
> disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any
> God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the
> statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If
> anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black
> people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
>
> Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his
> suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black
> folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright
> isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill
> Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of
> his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief
> in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN,
> when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people
> whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial
> minorities.
>
> So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is
> highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's
> favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and
> stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably
> accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy
> of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just
> enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the
> Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers
> opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers"
> who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel
> Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like
> Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but
> he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a
> Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell,
> and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
>
> What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no
> mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor
> worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation
> for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an
> intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the
> fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who
> died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were
> lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War,
> according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time);
> millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to
> some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day
> that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred
> years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown.
> To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the
> hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as
> chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of
> Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States,
> thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To
> some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life.
> Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
>
> But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find
> it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality.
> Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether
> in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with
> the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world
> like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as
> white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so,
> having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we
> cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally
> shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
>
> This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work,
> No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
>
> "White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor,
> grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very
> accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world
> they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire
> lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so
> lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example,
> sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."
>
> And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
> Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution,
> because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt
> racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history
> worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
>
> We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a
> white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and
> we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the
> U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say
> they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social
> science research to back them up) actually think that those
> experiences and that data might actually say something about the
> nation in which they reside. Imagine.
>
> Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright
> and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly
> challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black
> people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the
> "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of
> looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still
> dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the
> main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people
> do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they
> understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully
> committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those
> tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless
> America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and
> proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting
> against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods,
> throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when
> they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
>
> Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which
> black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to
> the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in
> this country--when they discover that such events were not just a
> couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy
> out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were
> never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events,
> advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even
> thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and
> drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were
> being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts
> cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that
> postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few
> whites, including members of their own families did or said anything
> to stop it.
>
> Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past,
> whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history
> so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for
> example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in
> 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed
> all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the
> papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on
> memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
>
> Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of
> lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to
> anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history,
> of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact
> into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white
> version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it
> so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more
> than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a
> re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their
> concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In
> that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of
> grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows
> Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in
> which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the
> sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These
> iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than
> selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and
> memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June
> Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks
> of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
>
> These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how
> disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them
> and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we
> wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color
> with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave
> it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed
> thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of
> the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus
> called out the National Guard to block black students from entering
> Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced
> to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they
> represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid
> the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who
> saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras.
> That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so
> many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows
> white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
>
> No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your
> teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon
> "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public
> denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that
> has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who
> have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling
> it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its
> implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of
> country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped,
> it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
>
> It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring
> shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are
> always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we
> occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for
> anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at
> all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate
> our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals
> prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as
> deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as
> though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
>
> So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves
> truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized
> fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to
> earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those
> fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing
> but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is
> that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is
> that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever
> have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we
> can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have
> yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
>
> What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every
> week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their
> lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while
> black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are
> demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to
> say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and
> worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling
> bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
>
> 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.
>
> 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 (Routledge: 2005). He can be
> reached at: timjwise@msn.com
>
> This essay originally appeared in Lip.
>
>
> Here's The big Picture!
>
> http://www.reparationsthecure.org/
>
> http://www.marchforjustice.com
>
> http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/feb98herman.htm
>
> Dr. Claud Anderson - http://tinyurl.com/34kuv7
>
> Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop -- http://tinyurl.com/3yuejc
>
> The GREAT Dr. Francis Cress Welsing-- http://tinyurl.com/3ay7h9
>
> The amazing Dr. Neely Fuller-- http://tinyurl.com/34ybws
>
> The stupefying Rev Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2jhvkm
>
>
> The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan-- http://tinyurl.com/2pr8dq
>
> Dr. C.T. Vivian-- http://tinyurl.com/2shh96
>
> Dr. Cornel West-- http://tinyurl.com/3d8fx8
>
> Dr Michael Dyson- http://tinyurl.com/2klt52
>
> Dr. Lani Guinier- http://tinyurl.com/2tagqz
>
> The incomparable Rev Al Sharpton- http://tinyurl.com/3a4drm
>
> Dr Tim "White Man" Wise - http://tinyurl.com/2trkyx
>
> Dr Jane "White Woman" Elliott-- http://tinyurl.com/38939f
>
> Mrs Ida Hakim -- http://tinyurl.com/2p883y
>
> Rachel Maddow-- http://tinyurl.com/3738py
>
> http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=White+Supremacy&search_type=
>
> http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Racism&search_type=
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/
>
>
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