Here’s the background: an old sermon given by Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pops up suddenly and causes political turmoil. Obama gives a speech distancing himself from Rev. Wright. Then, after a month of silence, the Reverend makes further comments. Finally, Obama denounces the Reverend forever. That’s the brief version, you can click the links for details.

So let’s move quickly through the Obama-bashing so we can get to something more exciting. But, really, the “God damn America…” sermon linked above and shown below is from 2003. Obama’s campaign is fairly well run, so you can bet they knew about this beforehand. And they were ready. They knew it was just a matter of time before it would come out, and they had that nice rebuttal speech prepared in advance. The “I wasn’t in church that day” defense cannot fool the critical mind. No self-respecting campaign would overlook this sort of potential political weakness.

But why is it a political weakness? Why do one man’s words reflect so strongly on another man’s political viability? Yes, Wright led Obama’s church. But Obama is Obama, and if integrity were his utmost priority, that’s all he would have to say in response to criticism. But something much deeper is going on here, and it’s this: white America can handle a half-black Harvard graduate who is careful to avoid using AAVE. White America cannot handle anyone that brings serious attention to institutional racism.

I don’t agree with everything that Rev. Wright says, but I do agree with the sermon that seemingly sparked all this controversy. See for yourself.

Those are powerful words. And they ring true in my ears. As Wright explains in an interview with Bill Moyers:

“When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you’re in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don’t think that goes. That is consistent with what the will of God says or the word of God says that governments don’t say right or wrong. That governments that wanna kill innocents are not consistent with the will of God. And that you are made in the image of God, you’re not made in the image of any particular government. We have the freedom here in this country to talk about that publicly, whereas some other places, you’re dead if say the wrong thing about your government.”

Wright is right, but white America is afraid of the truth he speaks, so Obama has to run from the truth in order to have a shot at winning the nomination. That’s called cowardice in my book.