To the question of the moment—What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?—I answer, Obama knew everything, and he’s known it for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah Wright’s disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack Obama must have long been aware of his pastor’s political radicalism. A careful reading of nearly a year’s worth of Trumpet Newsmagazine, Wright’s glossy national “lifestyle magazine for the socially conscious,” makes it next to impossible to conclude otherwise.
Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a “church newspaper”—primarily for his own congregation, one gathers—to “preach a message of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service.” So Obama’s presence at sermons is not the only measure of his knowledge of Wright’s views. Glance through even a single issue of Trumpet, and Wright’s radical politics are everywhere—in the pictures, the headlines, the highlighted quotations, and above all in the articles themselves. It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama himself graced the cover at least once (although efforts to obtain that issue from the publisher or Obama’s interview with the magazine from his campaign were unsuccessful).
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Wright views the United States as a criminal nation. Here is a typical passage: “Do you see God as a God who approves of Americans taking other people’s countries? Taking other people’s women? Raping teenage girls and calling it love (as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings)?” Anyone who does think this way, Wright suggests, should revise his notion of God. Implicitly drawing on Marxist “dependency theory,” Wright blames Africa’s troubles on capitalist exploitation by the West, and also on inadequate American aid: “Some analysts would go so far as to even call what the United States, the G-8, and multinational corporations are doing in Africa genocide!”
According to Wright, America’s alleged genocide in Africa, as well as its treatment of “Africans in the Western diaspora,” both leads to and flows from a single underlying truth: “White supremacy is the bed rock of the philosophical, ideological and theological foundations of this country.” So for Wright, it’s really not a question of correcting America in the spirit of a loving patriot. America, to Wright, is a kind of alien formation, scarcely less of a “cage” for “Africans in the Western Diaspora” than it was during the days of slavery: “This country is built off, and continues to exist on, the premise of white supremacy.” Again and again, Wright makes the point that America’s criminality and racism are not aberrations but of the essence of the nation, that they are every bit as alive today as during the slave era, and that America is therefore no better than the worst international offenders: “White supremacy undergirds the thought, the ideology, the theol-ogy, the sociology, the legal structure, the educational system, the healthcare system, and the entire reality of the United States of America and South Africa!”
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One of Wright’s most striking images of American evil invokes Hurricane Katrina. Here are excerpts of a piece in the May 2006 Trumpet:
We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy.
We need to educate our children about the white supremacist’s foundations of the educational system.
When the levees in Louisiana broke alligators, crocodiles and piranha swam freely through what used to be the streets of New Orleans. That is an analogy that we need to drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed all children!).
In the flood waters of white supremacy … there are also crocodiles, alligators and piranha!
The policies with which we live now and against which our children will have to struggle in order to bring about “the beloved community,” are policies shaped by predators.
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Wright concludes: “Giving Columbus the credit is called “American History” or “The History of Western Civilization.” Back in the 1960s we called it what it was and is, however, and that is “a pack of lies.” “
In that earlier striking passage on the post-Katrina flooding in New Orleans, Wright speaks of his determination to “drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed, all children!)” the idea that America is flooded with the “crocodiles, alligators and piranha” of white supremacy. That image creates the context for one of Wright’s most energetic invocations of “hope”:
We are on the verge of launching our African-centered Christian school. The dream of that school, which we articulated in 1979, was built on hope. That hope still lives. That school has to have at its core an understanding and assessment of white supremacy as we deconstruct that reality to help our children become all that God created them to be when God made them in God’s own image.
The construction of a school for inner city children undoubtedly falls into the category of the “good works” which nearly everyone recognizes as a benefit bestowed by Trinity Church on the surrounding community, Wright’s ideology notwithstanding. But is a school that portrays America as a white supremacist nation filled with predatory alligators and piranha a good work?
Wright’s status as a father-figure comes through clearly in the pages of Trumpet. In a Trumpet interview, Jesse Jackson characterizes Wright as “between a huge father, pastor, preacher, [and] prophet.” Wright’s young minister proteges call him “Daddy J” and “Uncle J,” and perhaps this latter name prompted Obama’s reference to Wright as “like an uncle.” Obama’s longing for a father figure surely gave him a great hunger to get to know what Wright was about. In their first meeting, Wright warned Obama that many considered him too politically radical, and it is simply inconceivable that in 20 years’ time someone as sharp as Obama did not grasp the intensely political themes repeated in so much of what Wright says and does. Radical politics is no sideline for Wright, but the very core of his theology and practice.
There can be no mistaking it. What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Everything. Always.
Paul K. writes: