The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy

10. Obama, Black Religion, and the Reverend Wright Controversy

TEN Obama, black Religion, and the Reverend wright Controversy JOHN L. JACKSON Religion and race invariably transform public discourse from civil, intellectual dialogue to irrational rancor. Combine them with the volatility of politics and one has an explosive mixture. Privately contained, the cultural exposition of these phenomena may create unity if not uniformity, cohesiveness if not consistency. Publicly expressed, they become the unfortunate foci of division, derision, and deep levels of misunderstandings. In every pivotal era of African American history, religion, race, and politics, in the private sphere, have combined to fashion a collective identity around which black people have come to feel empowered to change their plight and to make their way toward liberation. The controversy surrounding the comments of then presidential candidate Obama’s former, prophetic pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., can be traced to black religion’s1 unsolicited interjection into the American public discourse on diversity during an unprecedented presidential campaign when white America had begun to feel a measure of self-satisfaction about its capacity to transcend historic white supremacy and to elect a black man to the high office of the U.S. presidency for the first time in American history. Public questions were raised about Barack Obama’s church and faith. “What kind of church was this? And what about the judgment of a candidate for president 166 . JOHN L. JACKSON who could join the congregation of a preacher who spouts such outrageous invectives as ‘God damn America’ against our country?” It raised questions as well about the patriotism of Reverend Wright and the racial inclusiveness of black religion. Perhaps the controversy would have been less pronounced had black religion’s public, “civil,” face been foregrounded. But it came by way of the culturally specific space of the Black Church, not just a context for movement organizing and racial unity, but the setting for challenging moral hypocrisy in an oppressive society. Public, Private, and Civil Before proceeding further with an interpretation of black religion and the functioning of the Black Church, this chapter must qualify its employment of the terms “public,” “private,” and “civil” in relationship to black religion. My usage of the term “public” differs from that of Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in his trenchant article “Of the Black Church and the Making of a Black Public.”2 Drawing upon the work of John Dewey and Evelyn Higginbotham, he argues that the independent black churches of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were organized as publics, largely, but not exclusively, in response to U.S. government–sponsored racism and white church proscriptions against black participation in positions of power. As such, they were organized to meet the shared secular, as well as the religious, needs of their members and those of the black community at large. In addition to being “sites for public discourse critical of white supremacy and the American nation-state,” black churches were also “spaces for identity construction.”3 While the work in opposition to racial oppression is essentially public, the construction of a culturally specific identity both has a private and a public, but a particularly “black” public, dimension when conducted in an African American context. In this sense, it is also “private” (a “free space”) in that it is carried out, for the most part, outside the watchful eye of white people. Glaude appears to acknowledge what I am labeling as a private activity when he observes that “[African Americans] also spoke in a self-determining voice, defining a cultural identity through a particular idiom and style.”4 Even though the public role of black religion and the Black Church is generally unwelcome to a white public invested in its own interests, public pronouncements from the black religious tradition are made more palatable when they are clothed in civil garb. Civility lends itself to tacit acceptance. For example, over the years, throughout the nineteenth and into the early twenty-first century, the prophetic public role and the nation-state–like activities of the Black Church, to which Glaude refers, have vacillated and waned. ObAMA, bLACK RELigiON, AND REv. wRigHT . 167 Some hold that the mainline Black Church became accommodationist in the post–World War I era and continuing throughout the first half of the twentieth century.5 Black preachers, in particular, became “convinced that they had to curry favor with whites if blacks were ever to be permitted entrance into the mainstream of...