Reverend Wright and the state of racism in Pennsylvania

Much as I love to pretend that nasty things like racism and sexism don't exist and go along happily thinking that everyone who votes does so because they genuinely agree with the policies proposed by their candidate, I know deep in my little progressive heart that it ain't always so.

I continue to think that it is so more often than it isn't, but the whole scandal over Rev. Jeremiah Wright had me worried for a while. I just couldn't understand what everyone was so freaked out about. I mean, Pat Buchanan works as a political commentator, and Ann Coulter is a frequent guest on Fox News and nothing I'd heard from Wright was any crazier than anything the two of them had said.

But, well, people seemed bothered by it, though according to polls less so after Obama's milestone speech on race, given right in my current hometown of Philadelphia, PA.

So I turned to someone who knows all about the history of race relations in Pennsylvania, journalist and journalism professor Linn Washington, Jr., of Temple University. Washington is a columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune, America's oldest African-American-owned newspaper, and a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship program.

Washington has written his own article about the Wright controversy, available at CounterPunch.org.

Kaffeine Buzz: I wanted to get what you thought about Rev. Wright’s actual comments, first of all.

Linn Washington: One of the things that’s missing in this controversy about Rev. Wright is historic context. What he’s saying is accurate. So the question is, is Wright wrong in what he said, or is Wright wrong in the way he said it?

The reality is that the majority of the comments that are being raised were uttered years ago within the context of sermons, which by their very nature are emotionally charged.

Let’s take a look at a few of them.

America was founded on racism. Duh! The constitution has slavery embedded in it. In Philadelphia here you can appreciate it, what do we have down at 6th and Market? We have an archeological dig at what was known as the President’s house where George Washington lived when he was President, and much of it revolves around the slaves that he kept. Does that not give some indication of the country being founded on racism?

He talks about skewed spending priorities. There was a paragraph of a sermon that was in the Inquirer last week that was characterized as being un-American, where he said that they give us drugs and they build prisons. Well, in the 1990s, the state of Pennsylvania built 11 new prisons. During that decade in Philadelphia, only one new public high school was built. According to Pennsylvania State Correctional statistics, the majority of people who come into the prisons are unemployed and undereducated. So where’s the inaccuracy there?

We studied the whole Contra cocaine issue, where the Reagan administration allied themselves with Colombian cocaine dealers to fight the Contras. That helped precipitate—it wasn’t the main cause, but it helped precipitate the cocaine-crack epidemic in the 1980s.

And as a result of that, laws were passed which had a racially disproportionate effect on African-Americans. Again, historical context. Even recent history. It was just last November that the U.S. Sentencing Commission approved new regulations that will allow a lot of people who were sentenced under these really monster sentences to be released from jail. Congress approved it.

And it was the Bush administration who at the last minute raised this red herring that you’re going to be letting violent people out of jail, despite the fact that everybody would have to go through a judicial review where prosecutors could challenge it before they could get out.

And then there was the other aspect of Wright saying that American foreign policy was the cause of 9/11. If you look at the 9/11 Commission Report, what did it say? That in the Arab world, the perception of American foreign policy fuels anger and hatred toward Americans.

KB: Not only that, but Ron Paul has been saying that on the campaign trail.

LW: You’re right. Also, the Baker commission, that just came in 2006, what did they say? The U.S. had to change its foreign policy or we’re always going to have these kinds of problems.

So what he said is not inaccurate. Now this business about Hillary Clinton, well, it’s truthful, she’s never been called a n*****. She’s never been treated as a n*****. But given the controversies around that word and given the charged atmosphere of this campaign, there’s arguable criticism of--should he have said that in the last couple of months, which he did, given its potential impact on the campaign.

But the previous statements, you know, come on, please.

But it’s the political context that they, Barack’s opponents, are trying to find any way to try to derail him so now they’re holding him accountable for what’s going on.

Fairness and Accuracy in Media, which is usually fair and accurate, recently had an article, in the past few weeks about  how John McCain actually solicited the endorsement of this Texas megachurch preacher named John Hagee. And this guy says the Catholic Church is a conspiracy. This guy is so over the top that I don’t even allow my wife to turn him on. She had him on and I was just like turn that shit off. You can look at religious stuff on Sunday morning, that’s not my thing, but not him.

There was an article that I saw last week, where someone is actually writing a book, there was an article in The Nation, about Hillary Clinton….

KB: About the Family, or the Fellowship, or whatever it’s called?

LW: Yes. But the point is that a lot of people—one guy even framed it this way, he said if everybody was forced to leave their church because of something obtuse that their pastor said in a single sermon, no church would have more than three members in it. People would be constantly leaving, because everybody along the way says something crazy.

So get Barack for what he said. And this is just my own personal beef—I’ve got a real problem with this overemphasis on what people say versus what they do. I think Geraldine Ferarro was bigoted as the day is long, but you know, so what?

I’m more concerned that Bill Clinton, in 1995 when there was the Million Man March, he ran out to Austin, Texas to deliver a major speech on racism. It was hastily put together, they didn’t announce it until two days before the Million Man March. In that speech he noted how the criminal justice system is fundamentally racist against African-Americans.

And then what, ten days later when he had an opportunity to change this crack cocaine-powder cocaine disparity, he upheld a Republican vote against the recommendation of the sentencing commission.

I’d rather we focus on what people do, but we don’t and that’s what the problem has been, historically.

You would not know that December 30, 1799, 73 black Philadelphia leaders delivered a petition to Congress, asking three things.

One, they wanted protection from fugitive slave act abuses. There was this law called the fugitive slave act that allowed slave owners to go anywhere in the country to get runaway slaves. Slave owners were coming to Philadelphia because it had the highest population of free blacks, and snatching any black person off the street claiming that they were a slave and taking them back into slavery. These were people who were free, who had either purchased their freedom or were born free.

Two, they asked for a gradual elimination of slavery. And the third thing, this is part of the language that they used. They said that if the pronouncements of the Declaration have any meaning at all, that we as men should have equal rights under the law.

Congress rejected the petition. They could’ve taken care of this problem 200 years ago, because there was a debate in Independence Hall, January 2, 1800. They could’ve cleared this up then, but they rejected the petition, in part based on the assertion that the petition was written by white Quakers, because everybody knows that blacks can’t write.

The author of the petition was a guy named Absolom Jones, who was a minister in Philadelphia, the first black to be ordained as an Episcopal minister in the United States, and he’d already written a petition to Congress in 1797.

You’ll love this one, this feeds right back into the Wright controversy. Rev. Wright is condemned as treasonous and un-American because in a sermon he said “God damn America,” because America hasn’t dealt with its racism.

During that Congressional debate in 1800, a Congressman from South Carolina, a man named Rutledge, stood up and said “Thank God for slavery.”

I’m quoting all these facts and figures, I’ve been studying this stuff recently because I’ve written a few things on it lately. But these are the things that I study and apparently a lot of my journalistic peers do not. Some of it is rather arcane, and that’s what investigative reporters are supposed to do, but some of it is just clear.

We can’t divorce the political context from this. There is a myriad of different people with different agendas. We’re not just talking about Hillary Clinton or John McCain. There’s a lot of people who would like to see the Obama train derailed. So now because he hasn’t made any missteps, they’re going to try to get him.

What was it, three weeks ago that the controversy du jour was that Louis Farrakhan endorsed him? If you listen—and it’s on YouTube—you can find the Savior’s Day speech that Farrakhan gave and he just says that he thinks Obama is a nice guy and he would like to see him succeed. But not two seconds after that, he said, “I am not telling anybody how to vote.”

And immediately after the speech when it became apparent to him that him being Farrakhan, it may be alleged that it was an endorsement, he issued a clarification saying, “I don’t want anything that I say to in any way impact this guy’s campaign.”

And this became an issue on the campaign raised by Tim Russert, a guy who backed before during and after, Don Imus.

So what is it? Well, Farrakhan is an anti-Semite. Listen, I’ve been to dozens of Farrakhan speeches. Is he caustic? Yes he is. But who is he caustic toward? In order of priority in terms of the level of pillorying he does in his speeches: the first category that he hammers on in his speeches is black leaders. Number two is black people. Number three is America, generically. Number four is white people. And then we get down to people who may be Jewish.

Farrakhan does not criticize Jews predominantly in his speeches. And you wouldn’t know that Pat Buchanan, the political commentator….

KB: Pat Buchanan who came out in 2000 and said that all those Jewish voters in Florida couldn’t have meant to vote for him because they knew he was anti-Semitic.

LW: The Anti-Defamation league has written all kinds of reports about him and he says that’s just an effort to squash debate on the subject.

Last week I went into Lexis-Nexis, and Pat Buchanan ran for President in 1996 and 2000, so I put up a time frame bracketing around the main part of the campaign, and not a single article referenced any of the ADL reports about Pat Buchanan, some of which were written in 1984 when the ADL wrote its reports about Louis Farrakhan.

It may be interesting for an enterprising reporter like yourself to try to find a UPI article that was written between June 28th and 30th of 1984, with Farrakhan and “gutter religion.” The UPI had analyzed the videotape and the audiotape and came to the conclusion that Farrakhan didn’t say what he is alleged to have said. Of course that UPI clarification didn’t get the coverage that the other thing did, and even to this day, 24 years later, he’s still being alleged to have said that, even down to the FAIR report on McCain and John Hagee, it repeats the same thing. [I could not find the article, though I did find a website that referred to it. -SJ]

KB: It just seems that once something gets into the main media narrative, it never changes. Even with the Texas primary and Texas caucuses, when CNN called the Texas caucuses for Obama and said he got more delegates in Texas, they still report Clinton as having won Texas.

LW: And there’s so many of those other stories. The Dean Scream, that killed the guy’s campaign and he didn’t really scream. You look at the whole tape and he’s saying “Keep the noise down!” But you’re right. When something becomes the accepted narrative, truth, justice, accuracy, none of that’s going to blow it away.

KB: It’s laziness, I think. To argue it is just going to be more work. I argue it all the time, but not as many people read me as watch MSNBC.  But I did want to get your comments on Obama’s speech.

LW: I thought it was a very masterful speech. I felt that while masterful, very stirring, very informative, I felt that there were some fundamental inaccuracies in the conclusions that he drew, based on historic fact, and there was some context missing.

However, I understand that he was trying to do a lot of things with that speech. Not only was it a history lesson, it was an effort to regain some political momentum, an effort to chastise Rev. Wright but not to, as some people say, “throw him under the bus.’ So he was trying to do a lot with it. Overall, it was just an incredible speech. But as this guy has shown repeatedly, he’s just an incredible speechmaker.

I really found it interesting, only because I’m from Philly so I know things that Tim Russert and Wolf Blitzer wouldn’t know and probably don’t want to know, like the whole let’s get over this racism business. Well, okay, fine. Let’s get over it. Stop the racism and we’ll get over it. We want to get over it. The people who signed that petition in 1799, they wanted to get over it.

The Constitution Center, right, magnificent multimedia museum, opened July 4, 2003. During the year before it opened, there were continuous protests at the construction site for the Constitution Center because of the exclusion of female and minority workers and contractors. There were provisions in place that there were supposed to be certain percentages of females that got the jobs, and ditto for minorities. Here we are, 200 years after the adoption of the Constitution, and the building of the building that’s going to honor the Constitution has the same problems that were enshrined in the Constitution.

Of course, Obama didn’t say anything about that but he probably didn’t know about it, because if you look at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Associated Press, which would be the only ones that would really cover that controversy, and that make it into the Lexis database, they never covered it. And not only did I look at it from Lexis-Nexis, I also went into the straight Daily News and Inquirer database, and it wasn’t there. They didn’t cover it.

So they’re not doing their jobs of informing the public about the real realities of race. Which takes us right back to the Kerner Report that was issued in February of 1968 that faulted the media for not doing its informative job and that having a very negative impact on the understanding of the American public about the real realities of race. So we want to say that things have improved, but in many substantive ways they haven’t.

I just read Stu Bykovsky’s column today in the Daily News and he was taking—perhaps the first black woman columnist that the Philadelphia Inquirer ever had, and that’s an outrage in and of itself, but she and a black female columnist for the Daily News, in their columns on Obama’s speech, framed racism as a contemporary problem, and Bykovsky’s take was, “Why are these people still dredging up the past when we live in a world where there’s an Oprah?”

Well, yes, there’s an Oprah and Bykovsky’s at least semi-accurate when he says that she’s the most powerful or most influential woman in America, but Oprah herself has talked about the indignities from racism that she has suffered herself. Now this is a woman who makes $100 million a year and she’s still getting discriminated against, what do you think about Jamila or Robin who live right around the corner from Temple University?

And again, historically in the context, I told you about those 73 people who signed that petition in 1799, they were all property owners, they all owned businesses. What’s different now is that there’s more of them. It’s not that there never was, but again our limited understanding of history—most people don’t know that there were free blacks before the Civil War!

Part 2

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