The Wake

Rev. Jeremiah Wright

In the past few days, news anchors, columnists and cable pundits have been rigorously masturbating over denouncing Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the apparent anti-American jihadist. Decades after Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton, white pundits are still acting as surprised as ever when they see a black man radically speak out against this country.

In times when conservative commentators like Ann Coulter are needlessly accentuating Obama’s threatening middle name “Hussein,” the media moguls have made a frenzy out of a constantly looped YouTube video of Rev. Wright. Obama came out of this mess and called for a national conversation on race, but it didn’t do much to take focus off of the big news story of the week.

Obama’s call for a racial conversation may even be more controversial than Rev. Wright’s remarks to some political commentators. In today’s William Kristol column, “Let’s Not and Say We Did,” he writes:

“The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: ‘But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.’ The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race.”

Amid all this nonsense, let’s try not to forget that Rev. Wright is more than just the crazy fringe preacher we see on YouTube over and over again. In the past, he has had ties with President Clinton, was once commended for tending President Johnson as a Navy Medic, was named one of Ebony Magazine’s top fifteen preachers and was even featured reading poetry on a Wynton Marsalis album.

Although the focus remains on Rev. Wright, not many have paid attention to his church’s rebuttal to the controversy. Here’s an excerpt:

“Dr. Wright has preached 207,792 minutes on Sunday for the past 36 years at Trinity United Church of Christ. It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite.”

Tags: Obama's pastor, politics, Race, Rev. Jeremiah Wright