A Paradoxical Feeling
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Last week, Sen. Barack Obama addressed the recent imbroglio over incendiary comments from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Obama’s church in Chicago.
In a speech he gave in Philadelphia, Obama spoke of the emotional and historical baggage carried by the black community and the overwhelming resentment familiar to anyone who has faced injustice.
Obama denounced Wright’s harshest statements–the pastor has said, “God damn America”–while urging all Americans to join in discussions about race and history in an attempt to bridge divisions in society.
Wright’s sermons are rooted in the tenets of black liberation theology, the life’s work of James H. Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, whose books both informed and inspired Wright.
According to Cone, who wrote two of the seminal texts on black liberation theology–Black Theology & Black Power in 1969 and A Black Theory of Liberation a year later–the black community is constantly experiencing conflicts that are virtually irreconcilable.
In a Q&A with Hana R. Alberts, Cone discusses why Wright said what he did, where Obama’s emphasis on shared history comes from and the inevitability of anger in the black community.
Forbes: What don’t people understand about black liberation theology?
Cone: I don’t think people have done much reading about black liberation theology, and I think what they think–what they’ve heard–of what’s been in the media is often only a sort of–how can I say it?–kind of a distortion of it.
Black liberation theory emerged out of the ministers: out of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the late 1960s.
What we were trying to do is to show that one can be black and Christian at the same time. That one can love oneself as a black person. And also, in fact, that that’s the only way you can learn how to love other people.
And one of the problems in a racist society is that blacks who are the victims of that white supremacy often develop self-hatred. To see that self-hatred is to see what violence we do against each other. …
The violence that blacks do to each other is a violence that is the result of not liking who you are.
Now, Martin King was certainly aware of that, but he was addressing the social and political things in the society that made blacks feel less human. … He changed the laws of the society so that blacks could be more effectively functional in that society.
Now, Malcolm X. He was a cultural revolutionary. He changed the way black people thought about themselves. He helped black people to love themselves.
So black liberation theology is an attempt to bring Martin and Malcolm together. The “black” in black theology stands for Malcolm X. The “theology” in that phrase stands for Martin Luther King. …
King taught us how to be a Christian, to love everybody. And it’s important. But Malcolm taught us that you can’t love everybody else until you love yourself first.
And so black theology wanted to interpret the Christian gospel in such a way that black people will know that their political and social liberation is identical to the gospel and also identical to them loving themselves. That is, we are a part of God’s creation.
God created us black. And because of that, that blackness is good. So in a world in which values are defined by white domination and white supremacy–in that kind of world–then God sides with those who are the victims in it.
And so black liberation theology was an attempt to make the gospel accountable to the black community, who were struggling for a more just society in America.
What you have in Jeremiah Wright is someone trying to bring together Martin and Malcolm. He’s a Christian preacher in a white church, by the way. He is speaking to the hurt in the African-American community. The suffering.
You know, when King spoke to the black community, he spoke with language very similar to Jeremiah Wright. …
When King spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he said, and this is a quote, he said America[n government] is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” This was in 1967 at Riverside Church. And the media came down hard on him.
King said [he] gets [his] credentials from the gospel, and not from the government. He was speaking out against the war in Vietnam. Wright was speaking of the war in Iraq and all that. He was speaking to the same kind of reality. The language gets extreme.
