The front page of Sunday’s Washington Post featured an article headlined "At Obama’s Former Church, Hurt Lingers: Black Congregations Feel Marginalized by Uproar." The story that followed by Post reporters Eli Saslow and Hamil Harris took a sympathetic tack toward the poor, poor Jeremiah Wright and his followers without making any attempt to address the bizarre statements that caused such controversy. America deserved 9/11 for its own terrorism? The federal government created AIDS for black genocide? At their most specific, it was defined simply as "a landslide of negative video" and "right-wing political attacks" that left Obama’s fellow believers "marginalized and vilified."
Are the Post’s editors and reporters trying to suggest that bizarre lies like the government created AIDS to kill black people should not be marginalized? They shouldn’t be criticized? What sort of role does The Washington Post take as a newspaper, to suggest that vicious falsehoods should apparently not be condemned when they emanate from "marginalized" communities?
Here’s the meat of the Saslow and Harris story, lamenting the tragedy at Trinity United Church of Christ:
Obama, the biracial presidential candidate who has pledged to unite Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor, blacks and whites, was going to provide an opening for Trinity and other black churches to shatter their stereotypes and bolster their national presence. Instead, a landslide of negative video of Trinity's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and right-wing political attacks left Obama's former church and others like it even more marginalized and vilified.
As the controversy over Trinity crescendoed earlier this month, the church's new pastor, Otis Moss III, released a statement to his congregation: "We, the community of Trinity, are concerned, hurt, shocked, dismayed, frustrated, fearful and heartbroken. . . . We are a wounded people and our wounds, the bruises from our encounter with history, have scarred our very souls."
A product of black liberation theology, it teaches members to identify with their African roots and take pride in the African American experience. Sermons sometimes mingle biblical lessons with those learned from slavery or the civil rights movement.
Last month, when asked why he wanted to preach at Trinity, Moss said: "This is a place where the struggle continues, where you can talk about real issues. We can recognize social injustice and then take it on."
Obama has largely sought to avoid discussing race or racism during his presidential campaign, except when it comes to this country's ability to overcome it. His major speech on the issue in March was an attempt to quell controversy over Wright without making race part of his political platform. The Democrat casts himself as a unifier -- the son of a white American woman and a black African man, shaped by white, working-class grandparents and South Chicago's housing projects.
"We may have different stories," he said in March, "but we hold common hopes." And commonality, Obama often indicates, is what Americans should spend their energy discussing, instead of what he termed Wright's "divisive and destructive" rhetoric.
Because of that divide, Obama sent a letter to the church in late May tendering his family's resignation. Obama explained that it was with "some sadness" that he made the decision to leave the church where he discovered Christianity, married his wife and had his children baptized, but that he no longer felt comfortable being associated with the church's provocative rhetoric.
Again, the Post reporters utterly avoided quoting Wright’s "provocative" statements at all, which would make it quite a bit harder to gin up sympathy for the people who laugh and clap and cheer and jump up and down at the vicious falsehoods that Wright spews. There’s no mention of his strong support for anti-Semitic and often anti-American Rev. Louis Farrakhan, no mention of the strange articles in the church newsletter, and no quotation of his latest remarks at the Detroit NAACP or the National Press Club. Instead, the Post repeated the line that Wright was unfairly caricatured:
Wright, the author of more than 4,000 sermons, became a public caricature through inflammatory, 30-second sound bites. He reiterated his most divisive opinions during an appearance at the National Press Club in late April.
The AIDS conspiracy, only a "divisive opinion"? The Post also offered liberal black experts suggesting Wright was speaking the truth, and white people can't handle the truth:
"If a politician wants to move up in government, he can come to church and jump and shout," said the Rev. Barbara Reynolds, a lecturer at Howard University's School of Divinity. "But it is not okay to go to a church where they are speaking truth to power and talking about racism, sexism and capitalism."
Ron Walters, a University of Maryland political science professor, said: "Barack Obama is running for president in a country where 70 percent of the people are white. They demand that he align himself to their dominant view."
It reads like a whitewash of a radical black church.
