Rosa Brooks on Jeremiah Wright
Rosa Brooks, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times offers a reasonable assessment of what to do with Jeremiah Wright, his claims, and the larger issues he has unearthed.
With multiple televised performances, Wright has now definitively proved he shares that most quintessential of all American traits: a profound desire to hog the airwaves and proclaim, “It’s all about me.” Next stop: “American Idol”!...
With a campaign message emphasizing unity and hope, the last thing Obama needs is his former pastor running around espousing views most other Americans find offensive and deluded, such as the conviction that the U.S. government started the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy is little different from terrorism….
Something about our collective willingness to throw Wright under the nearest subway train strikes me as a bit too easy….
Let’s turn to Wright, the man with all the answers. Here’s what he said this week: “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and … what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”
That’s not a completely unreasonable perspective. The Tuskegee experiment was a 40-year U.S. Public Health Service study on the effects of untreated syphilis. Who were the lucky human guinea pigs who got to experience untreated syphilis? Poor and mostly illiterate black sharecroppers in Alabama, that’s who. They were falsely informed that they had “bad blood,” not syphilis, and denied access to the necessary medicine. The study was terminated only in 1972, when an appalled researcher leaked reports to the media.
That could make you a little paranoid. And it’s not a form of paranoia Americans can afford to scoff at. As the 2005 Rand study concludes, African American distrust of the healthcare system—stemming from “well-documented cases of racial discrimination that led to substandard healthcare for African Americans”—may be “one factor contributing to the AIDS epidemic.”
In other words, if we want to score political points, we can dismiss AIDS conspiracy theories as crazy. But if we’re actually interested in ending the AIDS epidemic, we need to understand how rational people can end up believing such theories so we can persuade them to change their minds and their behavior. The same goes for most of Wright’s other seemingly far-fetched assertions….
[E]ven if it makes us queasy, we should take his theories about the world seriously enough to refute them, carefully and thoughtfully. If we truly want to move beyond the politics of division, we can’t afford to do anything less.
I think I’d have more sympathy for this if it was equally applied to every preacher or pundit who says something controversial. Had the reaction to Falwell’s post-9/11 comment been one of taking it seriously enough to understand it in context and then refute it or what-have-you, then I think there’d be more of a case for this. That nobody ever calls for an inquiry into dispensational theology to understand the context of any lame remarks offered by tv preachers suggests that the sudden appeal to open-mindedness is due to the fact that Senator Obama’s campaign is damaged by Wright’s statements (and let’s face it, he’s the candidate the mainstream media supports). Ironically, if there is a case for trying to understand the views of Pastor Wright before rejecting them, then it makes Obama’s repudiation of Wright appear that much more motivated by political expediency, for if there is any sort of merit to Wright’s views, then Obama would be right to stand by him in spite of the controversy.
Comment by Timbo — May 1, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
Interesting take, Timbo. I agree that it’s interesting people don’t give Falwell or Robertson the benefit of open-mindedness that Brooks and myself are calling for with Wright.
Speaking for myself, I suppose my willingness to cast off Robertson and Falwell comes from the fact that my faith traditions are closer to theirs than to Wright’s. That is, I can relate to their quasi-evangelicalism and fundamentalism better than I can to Wright’s Black Liberation Theology given my similar conservative evangelical upbringing. I’ve admittedly dismissed them uncharitably at times without taking time to understand them better. It’s similar to the fact that I’m more comfortable with heatedly arguing with family than with strangers. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t still reject things Falwell and Robertson have said as I reject Wright’s comments. I simply think taking time to try to understand someone doesn’t mean an endorsement of their positions.
For what it’s worth, I think Obama not only tried to understand/explain Wright in his Philadelphia speech, his long history with the man gives him special credibility to repudiate him. I’m sure the hastiness and strength of his repudiation have political reasons, but Obama is in a unique position.
Comment by Tyler Watson — May 1, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
I should have clarified that I was commenting more on the call by Brooks and the MSM. I have nothing against you calling attention to the article.
I will, however, express a very strong disagreement over giving Obama a pass. What changed between March and last week? If Obama does have a special credibility to repudiate Wright because of a shared history, why did that repudiation not come sooner? Obama’s repudiation seemed to me to be similar to Captain Renault’s repudiation of gambling at Rick’s.
Comment by Timbo — May 1, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
I’d say the ‘deference differential’ between those two and Wright mostly comes down to
two things; knowledge of the person in question and the perceived power of the person in question.
Folks like Robertson and Falwell are (were) long term and well-known public figures, both because tens of millions of Americans share a similar faith perspective and because they relentlessly promoted their own cultural and political views well beyond their faith communities.
For my part, I felt no compunction about fairly quickly dismissing their crazier sayings or even making them the butt of satire (on my old blog and among friends), regardless of whether they were Christian leaders. Some of that was because I—and most people—were very familiar with where they were coming from. People didn’t need to ask hard questions about why they said what they did. They were both on tv constantly, and Conservative Protestantism—even the dispensational stream—is well know to lots of Americans.
But most of my willingness to dismiss their wacky stuff quickly related to their aggressive self-promotion and partisanship. When Christian leaders leave spiritual leadership and legitimate prophetic ministry behind in order to promote themselves and become straightforwardly partisan they can’t complain when people—including the news media—treat them as just another public figure.
When this whole Wright thing surfaced, nobody knew who he was. He also represented a church tradition—unlike Falwell—that isn’t well known to most Americans. In addition, he made his original comments in his own church years ago, and wasn’t actively seeking attention for those views outside of his own context. He became controversial because he got ‘youtubed.’ For all those reasons, I think people, including the news media, cut him slack.
I also think the general public—including the news media—viewed people like Falwell and Robertson as influential political players at a time when the US cultural and religious climate was running pretty strongly toward the right. Wright’s craziest comments—particularly the HIV comments—may hurt Obama by association, but association with people like Falwell not only didn’t hurt conservative Republican politicians, it helped them because so many people in the Republican base agreed with many of the religious rights’ nuttier stuff. That’s why you saw somebody like McCain—who obviously disdains the religious right—holding his nose and going to Liberty for Falwell’s endorsement.
My point is, people—including the news media—tend to hold people they perceive to be politically consequential to account for ‘crazy’ statements far more than they do others.
Having said all that, I think Wright’s latest comments change that equation in a major way. He’s becoming better known, is clearly politically consequential now, and seems to be actively seeking to promote himself beyond his faith community and in ways with clear political implications. I think you’ll see the gloves come off very soon if they haven’t already.
I agree with Timbo that Obama shouldn’t get a pass. That’s a legitimate issue in determining his capacity for good political judgment, which is obviously critically important in a president.
Comment by Tom Pratt — May 1, 2008 @ 6:44 pm
I like your response, Tom. The matter of political influence is an element we cannot overlook. There are some crazy pastors all around, but they don’t receive coverage because others don’t see them as all that influential beyond their congregation. That’s a fascinating angle.
My beef with Falwell and Robertson was that often they claimed they spoke for evangelicals and the media believed them. That’s why now we’re hearing about all these “new” evangelicals as if Wallis, Campolo, Sider, and Perkins are new to the scene.
Comment by Tyler Watson — May 2, 2008 @ 3:30 pm