The Automatik

In light all of the recent outrage about Barack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I would like to weigh in.

Until today, I had not seen the Reverend preaching, although I had heard snippets of what he had supposedly said.

Here is a clip of Wright talking about how “Hillary has never been called a n***er.”

And here is a montage of clips from Fox News.
(I have to laugh at the irony of Bill O’Reilly warning of “offensive” content.)

I’ve watched both of these and I must say, I don’t understand what everyone is so upset over. Then I have to remind myself that for a lot of white people, there is only one America and that’s the great melting pot that espouses freedom.

But for millions of people of color, America is anything but a representation of freedom. How can it be when America was founded on the enslavement of African-Americans? For everyone who would cry, “My family didn’t own slaves” or “Can’t they get over it already?” I will add the following:

Racism isn’t the guys in the white hoods burning crosses on your lawns. It is a systematic oppression that has been so woven into the fabric of life that many white people don’t even realize they benefit from it. And that is called white privilege. Owning slaves is just the beginning of it.

Keep in mind also that slavery was legal in America until 1865. Even after it had been abolished, African-Americans still did not enjoy the same benefits as white Americans under the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race. Before that, separate water fountains for African-Americans and white people were the norm.

Think of it in numbers. For the first hundred years of America’s existence, slavery was legal. And then for another hundred years, discrimination based on race was allowed under the law. That’s two hundred years of oppression. It’s not something you just “get over.”

So Reverend Wright is understandably upset. And while I am not a religious person, I agree with his indignation and his anger and his passion about these issues. Reverend Wright is not lying when he says, “Hillary has never been called a n***er.” But that isn’t the only face of racism.

Tim Wise has a great article on this called “Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth: Of National Lies and Racial America.”

“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.”

Please read the whole thing. And then, if you are a white person, think about it. Get mad, deny it, call me a racist, a traitor, or a bitch, but THINK ABOUT IT.