Barack Obama: Dividing (By Race) to Conquer?

To the extent that Obama is suggesting that dislike of the “worshipping style in some of the historically African American churches” created the firestorm surrounding his attendance at Trinity, he’s insinuating that those who took exception to Wright’s remarks were actually closeted bigots. In this formulation, it wasn’t the substance of the preaching but rather the “worshipping style” in which it was delivered – along with the exuberant, participatory response – that engendered the outcry. If Obama doesn’t understand that Wright’s calls for God to damn this country and other similar remarks are what created the controversy – not black preacher cadences and “call and response worship” – then his radical sympathies are so ingrained that he’s irretrievably out of step with mainstream American thought.

On the other hand, if he’s suggesting that the kind of hate-filled rhetoric that has apparently generated applause at Trinity is typical of the black church in America – just part of the “different religious tradition . . . in some of the historically African American churches” – then he has perpetrated a grievous slander against the black community he has claimed as his own. Calls for the damnation of the United States and the use of painfully divisive racialist language aren’t, in fact, typical of America’s black churches – most of which are centered on love of God, family, neighbor and country. If his comments were an attempt to justify his own membership at Trinity by asserting that its inflammatory, anti-American rhetoric represents the norm, Americans who don’t attend black churches need to know that’s simply not true – and black Americans deserve better from the candidate in whom they have taken such pride.

There’s no doubt that Barack Obama’s candidacy carries with it the aspirations of countless Americans for better interracial relationships. If he’s going to live up to even a scintilla of the hopes that have been reposed in him, he needs to start by making it clear that he understands that divisive racial rhetoric is always inexcusable – no matter from whose lips (or whose pulpit, or in what style) it’s issuing.