Barack Obama is giving a speech today to try to change the trajectory of the story about his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary rants have become YouTube favorites in the past couple of weeks.
Incredibly, former Bill Clinton operative Donna Brazile calls Wright’s paranoid and racist rhetoric moderate:
We’ve known, I mean I’ve known Jeremiah Wright and actually Jeremiah Wright is one of the more moderate black preachers. Just go to the church down the street from my house and I see women coming with their hats on the other side of their head [as Donna demonstrates in the screencap] because they have been lifted up.
In 1970 I frequently attended a black church in Augusta, Ga., at the invitation of a college friend. Those were the days when whites attending a black church were welcomed with the kind of cross-racial generosity envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King. When I attended services I was introduced and accepted sincerely. The sermons were about getting along, reaching out, living together.
I’ve always felt the high-water mark of race relations in this country was round 1978 or 1979, before victimology kicked in and some black leaders decided that getting along was not as profitable as making whitey pay. It’s been downhill ever since. It never occurred to me until the Jeremiah Wright controversy that a major part of the problem might be black churches. I wonder what’s being said these days from that pulpit in Augusta, Ga.
