We host about two dozen international delegations every year at the Interfaith Youth Core - African journalists, Pakistani businesspeople, European activists, Central Asian religious leaders, the list is long and colorful.
They come to learn about the “American system”, and ask lots of questions about the Constitution, checks and balances, separation of powers – all the stuff of high school American history.
Those things are all necessary to understanding what America is about, I tell them. But they are far from sufficient. To really know America, I emphasize, you have to dig into the African-American tradition.
You have to know that a race of people who were enslaved and subjugated for centuries by America decided that instead of leaving this nation in disgust, they would create it anew.
When African Americans had every right to seek revenge, they decided instead to build wholeness. At the open casket funeral of her brutally murdered son Emmitt Till, Mamie Till Mobely said, “I don’t have a minute to hate. I’m going to pursue justice the rest of my life.”
When African-Americans had every right to call this nation a lie, they chose instead to say that it was a broken promise, and risked their lives to repair it.
When they could have focused only on their own freedom, African-Americans dedicated themselves to building a nation where everyone would be free. As Langston Hughes wrote in Let America be America Again:
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
I owe my life to the African-American tradition. When I was in college and just discovering the shadow side of America – the brutal conditions our underclass endures, the marginalization our minorities experience, the wars we should never have fought – I could well have been stuck forever on rage had it not been for the African-American tradition.
The remarkable lesson of Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cornel West and the thousands of other distinguished names (and the millions we will never hear about) is that they understood rage but viewed it as a way station to something higher – love. “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend,” said King.
That love changed me. And it changed America.
And so I listened to Jeremiah Wright’s snaps and jabs at the National Press Club on Monday with deep disappointment.
Before this past Monday, I felt like the way Jeremiah Wright was treated by the media was a travesty. A hugely significant 36-year ministry twisted into a series of incendiary three-second sound bites.
I hoped (and frankly, expected) that he would respond to that unfair treatment with the magnanimous love that is deeply embedded in the African American tradition. I believe he is capable of that love, but for some reason, when the moment mattered, he offered us something very different. Those minutes on Monday were not the whole man, but heroes are made by how they respond to adversity when the whole world is watching.
I say this with great sadness: When I speak to international delegations about the people who embody the transcendent love of the African-American tradition - the love that changed a nation - Jeremiah Wright will not be one of them.
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