As I sit here and barf while listening to this sermon-pusher, the Reverend Eugene Rivers is on Morning Joe on MSNBC spittin' his schickt to Mika and Joe on how African-Americans are God-fearing, patriotic Americans who would tell some radical black man or woman in a minute to go back to Africa if you don't like this country. How Rev. Wright doesn't speak for them; he's a madman, an abomination, and all about himself, threatening to bring down the best thing that's ever happened to black people in America by claiming to represent the black church. Rev. Rivers was even courteous enough to point out that Rev. Wright doesn't even work for a black denomination but a white one instead. He was even nice enough to hold out Mika's chair while she sat back down (after a verrrry warm reception of him by Mika and Joe), what a nice guy.
Like I said, I barfed. I like Mika and Joe, watch them all the time. Joe is probably one of the most likable Repubs I know, a once prodigy of the Newt Gingrich cultural revolution legislature of the late 1990s. And Mika, daugher of Zbrignev Brizinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, is just sweet, cute and very open-minded about things. And the Reverend sounds like he's probably a hip dad from listening to him.
But, it all sounds soooo familiar, like in early 1960s familiar, when other respectable members of the black community, the black elite of that time, also were sought out by journalists and news media to denounce the rants and raves of another Reverend, as well as a couple of other religious figures of the time, saying they were madmen, abominations, and threatening the well-being in this country of good, God-fearing, love-America Negroes. They too were castigated, thrown under the bus, by these respectable men and women.
As we all know by now, with respect to those leaders, namely Dr. Martin Luther King, Malik el-Haaj Al Shabazz (you white boys, or in his case you devils, know him as Malcolm X), Adam Clayton Powell (whitey did their best to throw him under the bus of Congress by not seating him after winning re-election in 1967; it didn't work) and others, THEY WERE DEAD WRONG. Those leaders, and their then-controversial views, are the standard by which most if not all of Americans live by today. When Malcolm X noted that the violence that America perpetrates around the world would come back and hit us (i.e. "chickens coming home to roost") we found out in spades (no pun intended) on September 11, 2oo1. Americans of all races claim to revere the courage, strength and words of Dr. King in so many ways and examples. Adam Clayton Powell paved the way for the powerful Charlie Rangels, David Pattersons, and possibly the Barack Obamas.
To now hold that a Reverend Wright, as controversial as he may be and damaging to Barack's campaign, does not enunciate the frustrations Black America still feels, as they sit and watch today's news, about how 3 cops were aquitted for shooting 50 bullets at an unarmed Sean Bell in New York, about how black defendants in Texas, the most incarcerated state in America and most of the world, get the death penalty 30% more likely than whites, to hear that Katrina victims, most of whom are black, after getting the shaft on federal relief for 3 years, may owe money back because of some private contractor, to continue to earn 58 cents to a white man's dollar, is hypocritical BULLSHIT, ma'brotha. It smacks of a time when you were cowering to white power, instead of speaking truth to power. Martin understood that. Malcolm understood that. They had the courage so many of us all lack, to speak out. That's why they're dead.
Fearful blacks will live long, but will not prosper. A Profile in Courage to stand tall and face the truth may die in body, but never in spirit.
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