Look the reverend Wright affair centers around rhetoric and history. First Wright is a classic black power preacher circa late 60's early 70's. Basically the rhetoric is America has a long and entrenched Imperialist and racist history and one must shout that fact from the roof tops because the essence of American life is to deny those two central facts. It was meant to be incendiary, because black power rhetoric was meant to counter the conciliatory speech of black politicos. 

There are numerous problems with black power politics and rhetoric, but to be honest, its other black folks who will suffer the consequences, not white America. Despite America's dread fear of angry black people, there has never been nor shall there be some black power cabal exacting revenge on a sleeping white populace. And yes that includes the oh so scary black panthers. 

In the 60's and 70's black power rhetoric was common, however in our age in which we are in full denial of our national culpability in some very violent and unsavory deeds, this sounds like the essence of treason. How dare anyone speak ill of America after 9/11. We live in era in which patriotism is uncontested. By patriotism I don't mean the simple love of ones country but the idiotic symbolic display of this adoration. 

What is difficult for white Americans to understand is that patriotism is intimately linked with white supremacy--see FoX News if you have any doubts. Black men and women, from the south side of Chicago who have enlisted and fought in every war this country waged returned home to segregation, racial violence and the grind of everyday bigotry. They don't wear flag lapel pins, they don't joyously sing "God Bless America" at every opportunity--why the hell would they. Wright is the pastor of THIS community. And their experience vis-a-vis patriotism is complicated, and completely untranslatable to white America--liberals and reactionaries alike. 

I can only lend a story. My uncle, a good upstanding bourgeois black man was a decorated Korean war veteran. His family has been in this country since the 1700's and the men have fought in virtually every American war. Come veterans day and memorial day he flew the flag and occasionally marched in the parade. However when you spoke to him about Vietnam and the wartime experience of younger men in the family and their disillusionment and anger. He would say, they're right--this is a senseless war and he'd quote Mohammed Ali's phrase, Ho Chi Minh never called me a n------. Now, if my uncle were on FuX News stating this, he would be considered a commie, ingrate--the poster child of the 'angry black man'. But for him, America's imperial wars are not something to be proud of. Recounting Korea he would openly weep recalling that he had to kill so many people of color and come home to a country that treated him like dirt and thought of him as an ingrate, despite his service. Not just military service but service in Civil Rights movement--black political enfranchisement was not a gift from up high--Johnson or Kennedy--black folks, like my uncle fought tooth and nail, gave their blood for those rights. 

This is the context of Pastor Wright. And as indelicate and crude as his sermons may be that anger speaks to a social reality that defies translation to MSM and many progressives. With poor, isolated black America, you have at once some of the greatest patriots in DEED-they serve in the wars, die for "democracy", yet they are critics of the hypocrisy of the very system they are expected to cherish. There is a deep history here which sadly, but with little surprise is ignored. In order for Obama to truly address his relation to his Pastor he would have to sit down and give a three hour exposition on the history of this country. He'd undoubtedly lose the nomination of course. My sympathies are with him and anyone who in this climate of abject ignorance is made to explain the complicated legacy of race in this country.