San Francisco Examiner - May 1, 2008
Usha Nellore

In his recent speech to the NAACP, he emphasized the concept of "difference," saying black music, black rhythm, black English and black modes of learning are different from white ways. Harking back to Africa, he said black children learn with their right brains - not through books, but through the oral tradition. He cited black researchers as evidence and said black students, black musicians and black English speakers have been marginalized and demeaned by whites, who equate difference with inferiority.

How is this black liberation theology actually liberating for blacks?

It isn't. Not when he acts as though he cannot expunge any feelings of inferiority of blacks without also stridently disparaging America and white Americans while lying in the process.

Many extol the Rev. Wright's AIDS ministry, and this is commendable. But his inconsistent message about AIDS is not. When he tells audiences the U.S. government implanted AIDS in the black community, he undoes his ministry. True, the horror of the Tuskegee experiment (1932-72), when government researchers left black men infected with syphilis untreated and never told them why they were being studied, cannot and must not be forgotten. But years later to invoke this bitter past to bolster a case for a U.S. government-induced genocide of the black people shackles blacks to the past rather than liberates them.

True liberation from AIDS can be attained only by practicing responsible sex, by avoiding multiple partners and by using condoms. By shifting the blame for AIDS to the shoulders of the U.S. government, the Rev. Wright plays politics with a serious disease, diverts attention away from the true reasons for its spread and provides an "I am not responsible" excuse to the immature and irresponsible.

The same goes for his message about drug use in the black community. He says the scourge of drugs is another government-crafted plan to exterminate blacks. In doing so he disseminates an unsubstantiated message that manacles blacks who trust him to the ideas that they are being attacked without their own knowledge for no more than being black, and that if they don't watch out they will be annihilated. How liberating can it be to live with such constant suspicions?

And when those suspicions spill over into the daily interactions of blacks with the whites in their workplace or neighborhood, how is that liberating? Many members of Trinity have said they do not believe his outlandish utterances. But messages repeatedly spoken with conviction are bound to have a subliminal effect on the hearers. Some in his former congregation stoutly defend him, saying that when it comes to the reverend, the good outweighs the bad. But could it be possible for the bad to actually nullify the good?

The reverend unfortunately clings to the past tenaciously, he projects it on the present and he contaminates the future with it. He does not allow black children the talent to learn with both their left and their right brains, he forgets how many white people worship at the feet of black music, and he forgets how jazz is synonymous with America.

And in his world of emphasis on differences, there seems to be no place for the latest global rage - fusion food, fusion music and fusion ventures of all sorts that transcend differences. And when the reverend judges America as an evil nation, he does so by holding it to a standard that he himself is unable to practice - a standard of expansive love and forgiveness for one's enemies.

If America followed an agenda that would make it whole in the Rev. Wright's eyes such that he would raise them to the heavens above and proclaim, "God bless America," then for sure America would be finished, ground up as mincemeat and had for supper by the many thugs of this world!

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Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. Reach her at unellu@gmail.com.

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