Obama and Race in America

Well, Barack Obama’s remarks regarding Race, delivered yesterday to an expectant audience, were extraordinary. In subject and frankness Mr.Obama spoke with insight and eloquence. His unique talent—genius, even—is to lift the tone of political discourse and to transcend the moment. Of the multitude of words spun in the primary campaigns, these will most likely endure, particularly if Mr. Obama succeeds in becoming President.

He did not repudiate his minister, Jeremiah Wright, Jr., though Mr. Obama called some of Rev. Wright’s words incendiary. Taken out of context, as video clips, the words do appear incendiary.

What’s missing is the theology behind the seeming incendiary words, a black liberation theology. (Rev. Wright has a masters degree from the world class Divinity School of the University of Chicago and a doctorate from the well regarded Chicago Theological Seminary.)

His take on the Christian message involves a fierce conviction that Christianity can free oppressed African Americans and overturn entrenched systems of oppression.

In my estimation, what’s been missing in the furor over the relationship between Rev. Wright and Mr. Obama is a willingness to look at black liberation theology, particularly within the larger Christian context.

I wonder, will there be many sermons this Easter, from Christian pulpits across the land, speaking of Jesus as a champion of oppressed people, whose ministry implicitly threatened to root out systems of injustice whether in the synagogue or the state or the empire? If Jesus’s ministry was about anything, it was about overturning systems of oppression.