Wright's damage to his flock
People who are taught to use race as an excuse for failure are being robbed of their potential. Life puts obstacles to success in front of all of us and overcoming those obstacles is the task we all have regardless of race. If you are looking for an excuse for failure, you can always find one. If you look for a way to succeed in this country, you can also find one, but first you have to try. Being told not to is a disservice to everyone.It is easy to be outraged by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's abhorrent remarks, whether accusing our country of willfully spreading AIDS or being deserving of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And, yes, Sen. Barack Obama should have spoken out forcefully much sooner than this week. But Wright has done more, and worse, than tarnish Obama's presidential campaign.
Consider the corrosive effect Wright and others like him have on their communities as they rob thousands of listeners of the American dream: hope that through their hard work they can have better lives.
Imagine getting up each morning to go to work in a society that doesn't want you, doesn't respect you and seeks to hold you back. Your spiritual leader has told you this, after all. With powerful rhetoric, Wright has asserted, for instance, that white America sees black women as useful only for their bodies. If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?
Through my work with the Illinois governor's task force on human services reform and its efforts to reduce welfare dependency, I have encountered misguided community "leaders" like Wright who tell their followers, for example, that the job market is stacked against them and that the jobs that are available aren't good enough -- that they are entitled to more. The underlying message: You can't win because of who you are, regardless of what you do.
I have attended positively focused black church services, and I know that the Rev. Wright does not speak for a monolithic black church. But I also recall a conversation I had during a visit to the maximum-security prison in Joliet, Ill. As I sat in the library there, talking with three men about why they were incarcerated, one man said: "Look around this room -- almost everybody here is black. This is white man's genocide. You put us in here to keep us down." Where would this 20-something black man, or other relatively uneducated young people, get such an idea? From the vitriol spewed by the Rev. Wrights of this world.
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After the "war on drugs" was waged and stiffer penalties for drug related offenses were implemented a comparison of sentences determined that the average federal drug offense sentence was 49% higher for Black persons than for White. This is grossly disproportionate and must be addressed. While I agree that minority groups should be lifted up in their churches there also needs to be awareness of these problems. One doesn't exactly hear about it on the news. People must be empowered to believe they can make a difference but also be aware of where the differences need to be made.
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