Barack Obama's pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright, has lent unexpected significance to the presidential campaign, writes Vincent Browne.
FOR THE most part, American presidential elections are inconsequential, in the sense that it hardly matters who gets elected or how. The difference between candidates is more of tone than of substance. Once in office they all want to bomb somewhere, they do nothing about the staggering inequalities in American societies, they care nought about what the rest of the world thinks of America, they espouse the same banalities.
It seemed for a while this current presidential election would be the same. Barack Obama seemed different at first but then he retreated to the familiar cliches, about change, changing Washington, moving forward, blah, blah, blah.
But now it is different. Suddenly the campaign matters. And it matters because of someone nobody outside Chicago had heard of, Rev Jeremiah Wright. Not that he is much of a force himself, outside his immediate surroundings, but what he has come to represent within a few weeks because of almost constant coverage of his "incendiary" sermons on US TV channels.
Rev Jeremiah Wright is Barack Obama's pastor and mentor, almost "family". He is in a tradition of American black evangelical preachers of exuberant passionate overstatement, mixed with vivid language, sometimes confrontational, but touching a chord in African-Americans, which white Americans barely perceive and certainly don't understand. In itself one of the problems of America.
There are 36.6 million African-Americans in the US, comprising 12.3 per cent of the population. The number of people living in poverty, as defined by the US Census Bureau, is 39 million. Of these, 18 million - nearly half - are African-American. Just under half of the African-American population live in poverty, compared with 9.3 per cent of the white population.
African-American men have a greater than one-in-four chance of going to prison, compared with one in 23 for a white man. Although African-Americans represent about 12 per cent of the US population, and 15 per cent of US drug users (72 per cent of drug users are white), 39 per cent of those arrested for drug offences are African-Americans. Almost half the prison population is African-American and 42.5 per cent of those on death row are African-American.
This is a necessary background to understanding the anger expressed by Rev Jeremiah Wright.
In a 2003 sermon in his Trinity United Church in Chicago, in front of a cheering, clapping, ecstatic crowd, he said in reference to America's treatment of blacks: "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes three strike laws and then wants them to sing 'God Bless America'. No, no, no, 'God damn America', it's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating us as less than human."
Speaking in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he said: "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye."
In another sermon: "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought right back home into our own front yard. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
In yet another address: "The government lied about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein . . . The government lied about the connection between 9.11.01 and operation Iraqi freedom . . . The government lied about weapons of mass destruction on Iraq being a threat to United States peace."
The claims that the US government is giving blacks drugs and has invented the Aids virus as an instrument of genocide against the coloured people of the world are obviously absurd. But aside from these?
On August 6th, 1945, at 8.15am local time, just as people were going to work and children going to school, a 160lb uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. More than 200,000 people lost their lives, most of them civilians. More than 70 times the number killed on 9/11.
On the morning of August 9th, at 11.01am, another uranium bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki. Estimates of the immediate deaths ranged between 45,000 and 70,000.
In what respect was Rev Jeremiah Wright mistaken in drawing attention to the fact that, whereas al-Qaeda had caused the deaths of 2,800 people on 9/11, in two days in August 1945 the US had deliberately slaughtered 150,000 people and didn't bat an eye - and still doesn't bat an eye? How outrageous really is it to call on God's damnation for such evil?
In what respect was he wrong about the US supporting state terrorism against the Palestinian people or in supporting state terrorism during the apartheid era in South Africa; about the lies told about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction?
Barack Obama made perhaps the most impressive contribution to an American presidential debate in memory in talking about race in the context of Rev Jeremiah Wright's remarks.
He distanced himself from the extravagance but not from the subtext of African-American grievance and anger. But in doing so he has made race the defining issue in this election and, for that alone, he may be doomed.