(C) 2006 by Randy Shiner "Greenwich Village Requiem for the World"
I just saw Keith Boykin on MSNBC discussing the rantings of Barack Obama's pastor. Boykin is the editor of The Daily Voice, a website that is by and meant for black people. His point, which I voiced in an email to David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, is that Rev. Wright is speaking exactly what the MAINSTREAM of Black America is thinking and feeling in whole or part. While I happen to agree with most of what Rev. Wright said, it disgusts me that he would say that Israel is waging "state sponsored terrorism" on the Palestinians. That remark is just plain wrong and betrays the thinking of mainstream Black America as well, in whole or part.
Obama married into an old-line Chicago family, and undoubtedly this is THEIR church and is representative of the old-line mainstream black families in Chicago and elsewhere. There are some things that are so intellectually and emotionally disgusting and offensive that a simple "repudiation" is not enough. In all honesty, if my Rabbi ever got up in a sermon and started to rant about how bad Jews had it in Spain during the Inquisition as somehow representative of today's Catholic Church, I would get up and leave. A place of worship is, or should be, a reflection of who we are as spiritual beings. And if that pastor, who has been in Obama's family for more than 20 years, is reflective of who Obama is on a spiritual level, then I have some serious issues with all of the talk of "change" and "hope" and all the rest which I completely believe in with all my being. Obama has only to be true to himself. No-one else. He knows how to do this: he got up in front of Mainstream Black America at the Ebenezer Baptist Church to tell them that their anti-Semitism is wrong and needed to change. That same message needs to be spread to his own church.
Somehow, since Martin Luther King was killed, there has been no leadership in Black America and that vacuum has created confusion: it seems that Mainstream Black America has forgotten that it was Jews who were on the front line of the Civil Rights movement in the early 60s. Passionate Jewish guys who felt the injustice that permeated the South had to change died for their beliefs and their passion. It was Jews who tried to do the right thing.
Today, as for the past years, we have a black leadership that craps on us in return. The sad reality is that Jews got on with life after the Shoah and in America; the Mainstream Black Experience has not been so lucky, and I fail to see how there is such passionate venom against us, other than the fact that, in the main, we have been fabulously successful and as a result stopped whining and done something with our lives. Those black people who have "succeeded" in this country have done so in spite of, and not because of, "Mainstream Black Leadership" after Dr. King was killed. There is no Black Leadership. But I have never been called that "N" word. I am not pigmentationally "disadvantaged". Only religiously and culturally so. I have been called "kike", "Christ killer" and the rest. I am hated by some because of what I believe. Beliefs have no color, yet certain elements find reason to hate nonetheless. The goal should be to look at a man and not see color. We should, as Dr. King said, not judge a man by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.
If his mainstream black wife, Michele, does not understand this and is somehow keeping him at that church for appearances' sake, then the facade of honesty and all the rest is just that: an illusion. A Potemkin Village not of physical structures but of psychological ones which people like me have helped to erect as we cast our hopes, dreams and prayers on to a man who can lead us away from the descent of this great country. A place of worship is nothing less than, or should be nothing less than, a reflection of who we are spiritually. If it is not, then we are being dishonest with ourselves on a fundamental level. If Obama is serious, he will quit that "mainstream" church and go someplace to worship which is more in line with his own true values. Anything else is political garbage - the stuff of usual political machinations. We'll see how serious he is about change. It begins at home.
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