Seriously, Fuck You Jeremiah Wright

I watched much of the Bill Moyers interview, and almost all of the NAACP conference speech. I thought both were for the most part fine, though he can be a bit crude with his racial characterizations at times (and, yes, I realize some of them were meant to be humorous). Oh well. But the thing this morning was just a disaster. He gave a speech which was on par with his speech at the NAACP, but then the questions started and it all went downhill. I personally thought it was awful, but more so I just know that it is going to feed the right wing noise machine against Obama. Sound bytes abounded. Wright didn't seem to internalize that he wasn't in church anymore, that he was instead in front of a skeptical audience and is right in the middle of one of the most important campaigns not only in the history of our country, but of the whole planet. My take on it was that, for what I'm sure are a number of reasons -- including a strange combination self-aggrandizement along with a response to perceived humiliation -- he basically said a Christian "fuck you" to Obama and his campaign (I read that they've only spoken once since all this shit started, and that it was not a pleasant conversation). I don't doubt that Wright has some solid points to make -- however they may grate on racially uncomfortable white people's ears -- but when one stands in front of the country and say it's highly likely that HIV was created by the government to annihilate black people, one's more sane points recede into a static of paranoid hysteria. I mean, he could have made a lot of solid, reasonable points about health care disparities and the history of medicine's crimes against black people and perhaps even cite modern paranoia as an example of these problems. But he instead propagated a belief -- however widely held -- that is based on no scientific or historical fact whatsoever. I get, as best I can, that there are very different faith and cultural experiences and traditions at work here, but at some point people have to share a common bond of evidence and reason. Being a pastor is no excuse.

I've read that the Obama camp is fucking furious about this tour Wright is going on, but that there's nothing they could do to stop him. I'll be curious to see what Obama's response to this is, if there is any at all. It just makes me really sad, because although I think none of this SHOULD matter, it unfortunately DOES.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Deep South; I am well aware of the bullshit that black people still deal with daily. They have a reason to be paranoid in many respects. But to abandon reason and civility for shrill, manic lunacy is not the answer. It will be beyond a shame if the first competitive black (as we define "black" anyway) candidate for the presidency -- also the best candidate for this election -- is derailed by hysteria brought on by a black liberation theologian.

Obama needs to take this chance to step up and speak plainly about just how destructive rhetoric of the sort that Wright spews is to our country and to the black community specifically. Wright has served himself up to be a sacrificial counter-example to the unity and progress which Obama believes is our future as a country. If Obama doesn't take this chance -- possibly his last -- to leave Wright and his mindset in his personal and our collective past, he will have done a disservice to the vision he professes. If he cannot show decisive leadership in making a clean and principled cut, maybe he isn't the leader we thought he was.

Update: Slate's Trailhead has background on the AIDS nuttery.