The Roots Of Black Anger

Race: Barack Obama says black "anger is real, and to simply wish it away without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm." He's right. So let's examine these bitter roots.

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We saw last week just how real that anger is from the video clips of his preacher's shocking sermons. They jarred America's white majority, which had no idea the hostility in the black community was so fevered that it spews from pulpits by men of the cloth at America's largest black churches each Sunday.

Will he address ignorance on all sides?

In his speech, Obama rationalized that "the history of racial injustice in this country" gives rise to the kind of anger that fueled Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-white rants. He ticked off slavery, Jim Crow laws, school segregation and job bias, and maintained that discrimination still is holding back African-Americans.

While these racist crimes of the past still sting, Obama is wrong to suggest that legalized discrimination still exists today. There is no conspiracy of racism in America.

The harsh truth is, much of the anger he speaks of is based on paranoia manifesting in urban legends about whites creating AIDS to kill blacks or crack cocaine to lock them up. Wright spreads these pernicious lies in Obama's church, and Obama has rewarded him with $23,000 a year in donations, if not his own hallelujahs.

Intellectually honest blacks, such as Shelby Steele, will tell you that racism is such a distant memory that racial victimologists like Wright are now left with concocting wild-eyed conspiracy theories to maintain their power.

They see their power slipping, so "they rub racism in the face of whites," said Steele, who like Wright and Obama hails from Chicago's South Side.

It's self-serving black leaders such as Wright who hold back blacks today. In fact, Steele says their victim-focused, racial-identity politics has stifled black advancement more than racism itself.

"The No. 1 black problem is not racism," Steele says, it's groupism and a desperate clinging to the black power movement of the '60s. Obama's church requires members to pledge allegiance to this movement, recast as the "Black Value System."

"The pursuit of black power is the worst thing we can do," Steele said. "It's the kiss of death," because it falsely convinces blacks they can't succeed on their own as individuals in "racist white America," a mantra at Obama's church of hate.

The ignorance and paranoia is bred by something called "black liberation theology," preached by Wright and his own mentor, Rev. James H. Cone. This theology is the core of the "black experience" and "black perspective" and "legacy of the African-American church" that whites are told they wouldn't understand.

Now that Obama has opened the dialogue about race in America, we need to talk frankly about what this "theology" means to blacks.

According to Cone's writings and lectures, it teaches them that Jesus was black and blacks are the chosen people, and that the white man is "the devil."

It also teaches that black values are superior to American values, and as Cone himself has said, "all white men are responsible for white oppression" and will be held accountable and unforgiven until blacks are "completely emancipated" from white society.

We need to take these beliefs out of the shadows, because unless and until we do, this ignorance will breed more paranoia, which will just continue to fester into the kind of misplaced anger that ignites more Juneteenth violence, or worse, another South Central-scale riot.

Without elaborating, Obama conceded that some of the "ignorance" in the black church is "shocking." He has a duty to lead blacks out of that ignorance and heal the racial scab Wright and other race hustlers keep infecting with such belligerent bacteria. As a new generation of black leader, Obama must disabuse blacks of Wright's crazy talk, family friend or not.

Our racial problem stems from ignorance on both sides. It's not just the David Dukes spreading racist garbage; it also is the Jeremiah Wrights. If Obama is a leader worthy of the White House, he would lead us all out of that ignorance, blacks included, and not simply try to make excuses for it.