The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?
So this is what it looks like when a political leader tells you the truth. I had forgotten. I had forgotten what it looks like when a political leader talks to the American people, as one CNN commentator said, “like we were grownups.” Obama spoke to all of us yesterday not just in complete sentences, but in complete thoughts. He did not move away from the deep and abiding conflicts of race in America. He moved toward those conflicts. His speech was more invitation than pronouncement. He didn’t say ‘Here’s how we fix this’. He performed the truth that when you tell the truth, as the Bible says, it will set you free.
The searing truth-telling of Senator Obama’s speech today is an invitation to me as a white American to tell the truth about the past, the present, and yes the future. I find it easier, in truth, to admit the sins of the past and the failings of the present than I find it possible to tell the truth about the future, the future that I know as a Christian I should believe is possible precisely because I am a Christian. The person of faith should be able to believe that we can be one people; the sins of the past do not have the last word on how we will become as a nation. But deep down, have I believed that?
Here’s the truth about me and my family. I am the child of Hungarian immigrants who came to America in the early part of the 20th Century because they were literally starving in Budapest. They worked in the garment district of New York City and some became labor organizers to agitate for better working conditions in those sweatshops. The rhetoric of racial prejudice was high; my great-aunt would go on and on about “them” and how we had to keep “them” out.
I came of age in the 1960’s and I rebelled against my family, my immigrant past and also against my country. I protested against the Vietnam War, I volunteered in the Civil Rights struggles and found Dr. King’s leadership so inspiring I switched from being pre-law to being a religion major. I really thought we would end racism, end war and finally bring about equality for women. And then Dr. King as murdered as President Kennedy had been; Robert Kennedy was murdered. The war dragged on and then the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated. I continued from those days until this very day, the 5th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, to oppose war, to speak out for racial and gender justice and now also for gay rights.
But I realized yesterday that in my heart of hearts I felt a kind of outraged acceptance tinged with a very hidden despair that the best we can do on race and on equal rights for all is to achieve legal equality.
Last night, I sat in chapel and listened to Franz Joseph Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ” and I realized that I will remember this Holy Week for as long as I live.
Holy Week to me, as a Christian, has always been an invitation to self-examination and to communal examination, to recognize in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, his murder by an unjust and violent state, the true tragedy of the human condition lived under the conditions of sin. And then, to wake on Easter morning and recognize, with undeserved and unbounded joy that tragedy, cruelty and even the death machines of empire, are not the last word on the human condition. Resurrection means to me that we can all rise, that we are not to live by fear of death, but by the conviction that human life is infinitely precious both now and for all time.
But there are places, I realize today, that I truly didn’t believe, where I just didn’t go with the joy. I have accepted, I realize, in a depressed sort of way that the “original sin” of slavery so bounded us, so defined us as a nation that the best we could do is legal protections for African Americans to prevent the harms of the deep, deep prejudice that exists even today. And I didn’t always tell the truth about that. White liberal guilt will do that to you.
I will say today that I am convicted by my faith that we can, as a nation, rise out of the deep tragedy of the racial deformations of our American past. I tremble to say that because I actually believe as a white American it is not for me to say. Nevertheless, I will tell the truth. I will take a deeper journey this Holy Week and try to answer the honesty of Senator Obama’s speech with my own honesty—my own history is, of course, a different story, an immigrant story, but still a deeply American story.
It truly astonished me that Senator Obama was able to speak to my own white, immigrant past in a way that did not shame this past, but honored it for the life and death struggle it was. But that was then and this is now.
Senator Obama’s speech solves nothing but points to everything. The test is on us. Will we each meet truth with truth and will we then be able to be free for a future as one people? It’s not here yet, God knows.
I know one thing. This year I will try to let the joy of Easter morning shine into all the shadows, not only the shadows in my own soul but also the shadows in our national soul.
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