Letters to the Editor | Wright's sermons encourage reflection, not division

Who is being divisive? Is it Reverend Jeremiah Wright who spoke of the crimes committed by the U.S. government? Or is it the polarizing media who reduce his sermon to hate speech and exclude him from being an American?

I was prompted to look up Wright’s full speech after reading Allison Good’s article “Obama must distance himself from divisive pastor.” (3.27.08) I would encourage anyone to do the same instead of relying on other people’s interpretations or flat-out distortions of what he said.

Wright did not condemn America for no reason. He condemned America for sowing violence which only begets violence, for spreading war in the name of peace, for bombing human beings in the name of freedom, for terrorizing “minorities” in the name of civilization. Lose your guard as “Americans” for a moment and listen to him carefully:

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Aroawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadhafi’s home and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock! We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” said Wright.

Was what he said not true? Did those who we call Native Americans not pay with their lives and the lives of their children for being in the way of the murderous westward expansion? Did the bodies of thousands of innocent Japanese not explode when Truman-ordered bombs were dropped? Is racism no longer a problem in the United States? Are more Iraqis and Americans not assaulted, maimed and killed as the war continues? It pains me so much to say these words, but maybe we should be haunted by these images so as not to forget the ruthlessness of the violence still going non-stop.

Though I think the “we” that Wright referred to was the government, he would not be exaggerating if he also meant to say many Americans “never batted an eye.” How many people here on the Vassar campus care to inform themselves of what is happening daily in Iraq? When was the last time you saw pictures of dying men, violated women or bleeding children? How often does Iraq come to our minds each day as we go to classes, do labs, eat lunch at the All Campus Dining Center and party at Matthew’s Mug? And this is a country at war!

Wright’s provocation does not mean to be “spiteful” or directed at anyone personally, but it does mean to speak to the ongoing violence that should be neither dismissed nor forgotten. We cannot equate all frank criticisms of the government with being anti-American; all we would have left is a mere dictatorial hegemony.

And watch the self-defensive language of accusations used by Good: “Wright is still someone who, from time to time, erupts in anti-American tirades. This does not sit well with Americans.” With or without exclusionary intentions, such comments implicate that Wright somehow is not American, nor is the crowd who cheered his sermons.

All that Wright condemned was violence, hatred and terrorism. More importantly, he asked us to spend time examining ourselves in light of those events before inflicting pain and death on other human beings in acts of revenge. He did not divide people; he tried to unite us in self-reflection against the manipulation of fear and the hasty enemization of a distant other.

—Quynh Phan ’10