The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America

This stimulating discussion brings needed historical perspective to 2008's election-season brouhaha over then candidate Obama's longtime minister, Wright, who was lambasted for making what were widely considered to be racially divisive remarks from his pulpit after September 11. Historians Walker and Smithers argue that the currency given to the idea of American society as “color blind” or “postracial” saddles the culture with “a dangerous level of historical amnesia.” The debate over Wright can be properly understood only in the context of the country's racial history and an anxiety among some white Americans over black “otherness” and, more specifically, how the black church “decenters whiteness as normative to Christian identity.” While generally supportive of Wright's perspective, the authors criticize the minister for an equally unhistorical and essentialist strain of Afrocentrism. While the supporting evidence can sometimes seem thin (a random blog post, for example), the authors show there is much to ponder and discuss in the relationship between Obama, Wright and the dominant culture as, against claims to the contrary, they cogently reassert race as “the central social fissure in the United States.” (Nov.)