By Eddie Griffin
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
These people are not my people, though I am shamefully associated with them as an American. Nationalism is the only thing we have in common.
These people would hound a man and hound a man, chase him all over the country about something he said in the heat of a passionate sermon. So what if he railed against the evil doings of our government and its benign neglect of the poor? So what if he lambasted America with hot scalding words? (But note, however, that these are his words, not words from heaven… not words from the lips of a politician… and certainly not the words of all African-Americans). Nevertheless, they would not let it be. They had to chase him down, corral and lasso him, and lynch him like a Mississippi sharecropper because his words irked them.
It would be one thing to condemn him for what he said, but it is patently evil to condemn another man… in this case, Barack Obama, candidate for the presidency of the United States. The sermonizer is pastor and community leader, Jeremiah Wright.
The only reason the media chased Wright down was to use his words to defame and lynch the innocent man Barack Obama, simply because he was a hearer of words of Wright’s sermons. This reminds me of what might have happened to those slaves in church who listened and overheard a plot to revolt.
Lord, help us! What does this say about the culpability of the rest of us African-American churchgoers who sits and idly listens to a Sunday sermon? If the Bible teaches one thing, it teaches that every man would give account of his own words.
So, why must Barack Obama give account of the words of Jeremiah Wright? Is this the proper standard of judgment?
No one can tell me how an innocent black man might be defamed, condemned and lynched, or framed and sent to prison. It’s the American way. It’s politics. It’s mass social control through the purposeful deceit and subliminal agitation of hatred and fear.
I commend Pastor Wright for taking the media head on. These people seem that they cannot be satisfied with simply creating controversy… no, not these people. They have to divide us by the color of our skin and then pit us one against the other… provoke suspicion and animosity… like the devil is behind the camera, giving the viewer snippets of truth and distorting fact. To what end will these people go to destroy Barack Obama’s chances of being the next President of the United States?
The lynch law says: Guilty by Association. At a time when the Jeremiah Wright’s story should have long been out of the news, they continually play it over and over and over again… on television… on radio. It is making Afro-America nauseous. (Don’t forget: This lie is being brought to you by ABC, CBS, FOX, MSNBC, CNN, and a hose of agents of deceit). They associate the innocent with the guilty because they cannot find anything, otherwise, to fault Barack Obama.
Is this the worst they can find… snippets of Barack Obama’s former pastor’s sermon? (The devil will go to the ends of the earth, and even before the throne of heaven, to falsely accuse the innocent of some guilt, even guilt by mere association. This is the American way.
So, these people just could not leave well enough alone… these people. They had to chase Pastor Wright down, with barking television bloodhounds in tow. And, after they catch him and he grants them an interview at the National Press Club, they turn around and say: “This is not going to help Barack Obama.”
What does that say about the rest of us Afro-Americans… that we are chicken liver? (You can almost see the devil in the crowd, whispering from ear to ear, “Crucify… Lynch him.” It comes as no surprise that the devil will do any and everything in his power to protect the kingdoms of the world where he rules by “divide and conquer”?) These people and their idea of politics is just a sport for lynching another black man and destroying the hopes of the sick-and-tired masses.
There is no Moses… there is no Messiah, these people say. Like the words of the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in referring to Martin Luther King, Jr. as a “messiah” for the hope of Negroes, in the same breath, he also characterized King as “the most dangerous man in America”. These same people, with their insatiable appetite for hate, ate it up… hook, line, and sinker… like fried eggs on toast… Then they consented to kill our dream with an assassin’s bullet. Now, today, these very same people shed false tears like they truly cared. Worse, they pretend, like hypocrites, to care about the future of our community, us African-American people, and our leaders. They intervene with their commentaries just so we wont duped or sucked in by charlatans… for the sake of our own good. (Which of the prophets did their fathers not kill?)
Ever black leader in our generation who has had to courage to speak truth to power have been ostracized and condemned before our very eye… not only Martin Luther King, Jr., but also Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and on down the line. They have castrated every black leader who ever opened his mouth and uttered hope to the downtrodden masses… that is, every black man who has not cloned for white America’s acceptance.
But here is where they got it wrong, and Wright got it right. The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is similar to the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Obama is more “white” than black as King was more pacifist and tolerant. Obama speaks the king’s language, of hopes and dreams and possibilities. Where firebrands like Malcolm and Wright boldly declare that we will all either learn to live with each other or we will all perish together as a nation. 9/11 proved that.
But these people forgot that Barack Obama was brought up by white grandparents, reared on American idealism and hope. He never knew this thing called black rage, except that it existed, and still exists, deep in the hearts of most Afro-Americans, like a wound that can never be allowed to heal. But Barack is more like them in ideals than he is with the true parsimonious sentiments of black America. Being born of mixed marriage, he has only our skin color in common. He does not have the militant anger that we Afro-Americans cut our teeth on. He is a sweetheart compared to the volcanic seething just below the surface of our black skin.
For the sake of consciousness and a good night’s sleep, it is better to hear the words of hope coming from Barack Obama than the bitter words of Jeremiah Wright and what’s on the minds of most African-Americans. Obama’s words are wholesome and digestible. The words of Eddie Griffin are indigestible.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Mr. Griffin.
ReplyDeleteI found this websit and your blog by accident. I am glad to see you are still "preaching". I met you in Ft. Worth at the Juneteeth festival some years ago, Hope you are still wearing your "I AM HIP-HOP" shirt!!
I'm glad you found me. It must have been 3 or 4 years. I don't know what ever happened to that t-shirt, but I do remember being adopted by the hip-hop generation.
ReplyDeletei have yet to see all of reverend wright's firebrand sermon damning america. don't care if i ever see it. i did watch the 36 minutes he talked to the naacp in detroit. that was better than obama's speech in philly. i love the tradition of right. the man's just different cloth. different line of thought. i could see that performance side of his tradition. didn't make me see his words as anything less than cogently read, to the point, entertaining and insightful... goddamn then for not hearing something so wright and making it seem so wrong.
ReplyDelete