Guilty by Association: The Impact of the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright's Remarks Following 9/11

Guilty by Association: The Impact of the
Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright’s Remarks
Following 9/11
by Aretha Marbley — February 24, 2009

An African American professor evokes honest discourse on the controversy surrounding the
remarks of President Barak Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Wright. She parallels this to the
racial divide that emerged between White Americans and African Americans during the trial and
acquittal of O. J. Simpson 13 years ago. She uses this controversy and racial differences not to
change her students’ opinions of the Rev. Wright’s sermons or their fundamental belief systems,
but rather as a chance for both her and her students to grow as a result of it and as a rare
opportunity to narrow the racial gap.

                                     The Ladies on The View

Can anyone tell me what the controversy surrounding Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright is
all about? A barrage of political comments all over the spectrum was spurted and spewed out.
The week’s topic for my Tuesday night’s (Spring 2008 semester) Counseling Diverse
Populations class was Counseling Black/African American Clients. With just bits and pieces of
the controversy in tow, I was struck by the heated debate and disagreement his words evoked.
What piqued my interest even more was how both White Americans and African Americans had
such passionate, but opposite interpretations of his comments.

A few minutes before class started, I had just read a forwarded e-mail from a White American
pastor (with doctorate from Duke University) and theologian espousing a loving and passionate
defense of Reverend Wright’s liberation theology. A day earlier, I caught the tail end of a
segment of the ladies on The View discussing Dr. Wright and then Senator Obama. Whoopie
Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd (the African American co-hosts) in another one of their heated
discussions with Elisabeth Hasselbeck (the White American ultra-conservative-Republican
female co-host), were expressing their disbelief of Elisabeth’s outrage and attacks on what she
perceived as the Reverend Wright’s anti-American, racist remarks and Senator Obama’s guilt by
association. At the same time, Joy Behar (the more liberal White co-host) was trying to provide
Elisabeth with the historical context of racism and racial discrimination and a 400 year legacy of
slavery as lenses to the interpret Reverend Wright’s remarks.

With no avail, Elisabeth persisted with relentless self-righteous attacks on Obama’s refusal to

renounce his Pastor, Reverend Wright, for his racist remarks and on Obama himself for being a
racist by calling his grandmother, “A typical White woman who feared Black Men.”

Two things stood out to me: first, how Whoopie and Sherri’s efforts to increase Elisabeth’s
understanding of the Black experience fell on deaf ears, and second, the deafening silence of the
largely White audience. I sat on the side of my bed with a sinking feeling in the pit of my
stomach. Here we go again! Replay incident—a familiar, but different ring with the same racial
undertone. It was like reliving the racial divide over the O. J. Simpson trial all over again.

                           Tupac and Elvis are Dead and O. J. Did It?

Nearly a decade and a half ago, O. J. Simpson’s acquittal for the murder of his wife, Nicole,
resulted in our nation’s painful divide along Black and White racial lines. I understood, like most
African Americans, that for Black Americans, it was the unjust criminal justice system that had a
history of unfair convictions of Black folk that was on trial, and thus, Simpson’s acquittal was a
triumphant, victorious moment in history—justice had been done! Due to a history of racist
convictions of Black men, it was not beyond African American thinking that Orthanel J. could
have been framed, and therefore, justly found to be innocent, and innocent in a White system.
 Meanwhile, on the other side of the racial divide, White Americans were outraged that O. J.
could commit a murder and go free.

For a fleeting moment, pent up anger at the bald-faced, uncensored and unabashed, blind,
inexcusable, and unapologetic privilege, hypocrisy and human arrogance exhibited by some of
the members of the majority culture, gripped the bottom of my gut and triggered painful
memories of social injustice in my experiences as an African American woman in an America
that I had buried for my sake and for the sake of reconciliation. In an emotionally charged voice,
I began with a whisper of my own buried memories that the Reverend Wright’s words conjured
up for me.

I told them about my brother who was sent to a hard core prison at age 17 for allegedly stealing a
can of soup from a White grocery store and being made to lay across a barrel with his pants
down, whipped with a leather strap with holes in it until he bled, and then having to get up and
say, “Thank you Captain” to a White male warden. That same prison was an Arkansas State
Prison (Cummins Prison Farm) where hundreds of Black men were falsely reported as prison
escapees (portrayed in the movie Brubaker), when in reality they were butchered and beaten by
prison officials and buried in hog pens.

As my voice gained strength, another memory flashed before me. I was snatched back to
downtown Pine Bluff, Arkansas in the mid-1960s where a seven year-old me was a passenger in
a head-on two-car collision. I watched my mama swallow her pain and her pride while she
watched me being hauled around the back of a medical clinic and rushed through a side door
with a vivid sign on it that said Colored Only because Blacks were not allowed to come through
the front door.

The most vivid memory of all, I told my class was of my experience while standing in this very
education building, before a classroom of conservative Republican White students (who had

spent the day with signs and singing patriotic songs such as “God Bless America” and expecting
everyone to join them) the day following 911. During a discussion on the tragedy of 911, I said
to them, “Not everyone feels about America as you do. America has done some hideous things to
people, specifically people of color, like slavery, the Indian holocaust, and placing Japanese
Americans behind barbed wire fences during World War II.”

The injustice came a few days later when I was hauled to my Department Chair’s office under
the charge of my attacking President Bush and the American troops. With a bent head and a
heavy heart, I left the Chair’s office. After spending over an hour defending myself and the truth
of historically accurate and worthy words, ones that ironically were easily allowed to be
misconstrued and quashed in a college of education in an institution of higher education based on
students’ complaints, I felt powerless and a bit sad.

Surprisingly and heartwarmingly, when I finished sharing these personal experiences, the
students in this Counseling Diverse Populations class nodded their heads in affirmation and
validation not because they understood, but rather as a symbol to me that they felt my pain.
Amazingly, I was transformed by this show of solidarity and the invisible unsolicited tears that
they shed on my behalf.

As a result of their efforts and openness to being transformed by my experiences, I choked back
the pain and that anger of the injustices of yesteryear and used this incident as an opportunity to
educate, heal, and teach them (and myself) how to be tolerant of other experiences. Gently, I
reminded them that they have disagreed with me over the course of this semester about so many
topics and even presented opposing views on The Reverend Wright and Senator Barak Obama
tonight. Yet, I have not and will not disown them as my students, nor have I disassociated myself
from them and neither have they disowned me.

Further, I said, “Though all of you are training to be professional counselors, most of you are
lifelong members of churches and a political party that have openly made hateful, oppressive
remarks against Black people and other marginalized people such as LGBTQs, and again, I
reminded them that I have not held them accountable for either their church’s doctrines or the
behavior of its leader or members.”

As I listened with interest and respect to their responses, I remembered a chained e-mail that I
had received a few years back that had two lists: “Ten things that Black people know that White
people don’t know” and “Ten things that White people know that Black people don’t know.” I
chuckled to myself as I told them some of the statements on those lists. One of the items on the
list of things that Black people knew that White folk didn’t know was “Elvis is dead.” Of the
items on the list of things that White people knew Black folk did not know was “Tupac is dead”
and the other was, “O. J. did it.” The class laughed heartily with me.

Recently, I heard an expert on the party caucuses say that Obama must move quickly to explain
his value system and what it means to him or risk having the issue defined by critics.
Disappointingly, in order to continue as a viable candidate for president, Senator Obama was
later forced to dissociate himself from Dr. Wright; and with that very action, at least to me, the
truth of the social injustices of African American people in the United States was minimized.

A Transformation

Although that night there were no critics to make us move quickly and no attempt was made to
change anyone’s deep-seated beliefs, our fundamental religious and political differences
remained virtually unchanged. In spite of this, my diversity class and I knew that we had
choreographed something miraculous. In the days following that class session and at the end of
the course, I received correspondence from my students regarding this life altering experience. In
a course that is heavily-emotionally charged, it is difficult to know the extent that one single
incidence or experience might change another’s life or its far-reaching implications in the short
period of one class.

Nonetheless, collectively my students learned that it was more difficult to look inside oneself as
opposed to outside to learn. One student wrote, “When we examine and analyze something or
someone else, it is always easier because if we find something that we weren’t expecting (good
or bad) we can say that is not within ourselves.” Another student wrote, “I have more than
anything become more comfortable in discussing and being aware of my own attitudes towards
working with people of diverse populations. I think that I was being way too hard on myself at
the beginning of the course and have overcome some emotions that were related to diversity in
my life. Issues with diversity were due more to insecurities about and unawareness of my own
attitudes.”

Several more written remarks from other students were also self-reflective of the valuable
lessons learned from this class. “Learning something about oneself is one of the hardest
challenges we face as human beings;” “This past week was a roller coaster ride of emotions as I
struggled with the information in the class, the information in the book, and the information
within me.”

                                            Conclusion

To sum up the lessons learned, one student’s journal said, “We can conveniently tuck whatever it
is away and we don’t have to carry it around with us. At the instance that we learn something
uncomfortable about ourselves, it is then that we realize that in essence we are naked and
therefore become ashamed. I don’t mean to compare self-exploration to the original sin, but only
to say that discovery is not always a pleasant experience. I was lucky that through this class I
was able to see how passionate and embracing I really am as a person. Luckily what surprised
me was something good and not shameful.”

In the end, this incident was simply a culturally different way to expand students’ worldviews---
what Ivey, Ivey, and Simek-Morgan (1993) referred to as cultural intentionality. Whether Tupac
and Elvis are dead or alive or whether O. J. did or did not do it, that night, in our hearts, we knew
that the racial divide gap in our West Texas classroom had closed a little bit, and we were all
thankfully and willingly—guilty by association.

Reference

Ivey, A. E., Ivey, M. B., & Simek-Morgan, L. (1993). Counseling and psychotherapy: A
multicultural perspective (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: February 24, 2009
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 15574, Date Accessed: 6/30/2009 2:28:56 PM

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