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Beginning in March 2008 and extending through the last Democratic primaries of early June, the United States witnessed the most brazen demonization in its history of a person based on his race, his creed, and his ties to a presidential candidate. One major purpose behind these attacks was to use the demonized figure to discredit the politician. But participation in the attacks also fed the voracious, twenty-four-hour-a-day media appetite, and quickly took on a life of its own. When we look back at the ugly spectacle then taking place, the evidence suggests that, despite much optimism about narrowing racial divides and an emerging "post-racial" consciousness, something much closer to the opposite had gripped America.
Of course, we are referring to the U.S. political class and establishment media's treatment of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Barack Obama. Contrasted with their handling of the Reverends John Hagee, Rod Parsley, and Pat Robertson and their links to John McCain, this episode provides an outstanding illustration of this country's racism, chauvinism, and political biases.
Now retired from the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago-the '"best representation' of black liberation theology," as James Cone told the New Yorker1-where he served as pastor for thirty-six years, Wright had known Obama for close to twenty of those years. Because of Obama's membership in Wright's congregation, Obama's two coming-of-age books and numerous testaments about his relationship with Wright, and Wright's early role in Obama's presidential campaign, where until March 14, he was chairperson of its African-American Leadership Committee, both men had long anticipated the day when someone would use the big-city black preacher against the black candidate.2 "They're going to associate your name with mine, and that could be detrimental," Wright recounted in a PBS interview shortly after Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007. "[Conservative bloggers and pundits have begun raising concerns about Wright's Africentric theology and his liberal, some say radical, politics," PBS added.3*
ABC's Good Morning America first triggered the avalanche of Wright coverage on March B, when it played four short video-clips of "controversial statements," and framed them with the leading question: "Could the reverend become a liability?"4 The next day, without referring to a single word from Wright, Obama issued a blanket condemnation: "I...