Racial Elephant in the Room

It’s not surprising that Barack Obama would win the Democratic caucus in overwhelmingly white Iowa. He’s been a rising star since well before his rousing keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and that speech put him in the limelight to stay. Whether you agreed or not with the policies he advocated, or supported his candidate at the time, the speech was one of hope and belief in the greatness of his country. It helped that it was delivered with a flawless accent devoid of the pattern that sets so many black voices indelibly apart. The man on that dais was undeniably and unequivocally American. What does surprise me is that his church isn’t more of an issue, Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC). When I first heard about it I thought it was a false lead, one of those alarmist charges so easily spread over the internet like the rumor he is a closet Muslim. But it’s his church all right and it delivers a message that is stridently racist in its orientation. On their web site “about us” I count sixteen references to civil rights issues and Black origins, easily more than references to faith or religion. They call themselves an African people. Not once is America or the United States mentioned. They have Black values, not Christian. It is a message that harkens back to bad old days when Olympic athletes were raising their fists in Black Power salutes and “burn baby burn” was a catch phrase for the movement. It is a disturbing image and not one I am comfortable in associating with a serious presidential candidate. I haven’t seen much mention of it in the press, not nearly the attention paid to Mike Huckabee’s or Mitt Romney’s respective religions. Columnist Erik Rush did a piece on it in The New Media Journal back in February substituting “white” for African in the TUCC 10 point vision to point out how racist that would be but I never heard of him before I started researching this. Monroe Anderson apparently wrote a rebuttal to Rush for the Chicago Sun-Times but I can’t find it and the issue doesn’t seem to have stirred up much controversy. It should. Senator Obama may be sincere in wanting to be president for all Americans. I think he probably is. He may not sanction the separatist message of TUCC but belonging to a blatantly racist church should raise at least as many questions as would belonging to a golf club that excluded women. Somebody needs to start asking these questions before we go further down this path. Are Senator Obama’s values Black values? Are those different from American values? His church seeks reconciliation but their rhetoric is confrontational. With whom and how do they propose to reconcile? They have a “non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA” (emphasis theirs). Does Sen. Obama have a non-negotiable commitment to America? Does his church have any Asian or European American members? Would they be welcome? Mitt Romney has been criticized for belonging to a religious community that once excluded blacks. Why shouldn’t that standard apply to Barack Obama? Another Black American gave a speech more than forty years ago that resonated far more than any Sen. Obama has given or is likely to give. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamt that one day his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We’ve come a long way since those dark days. We have a ways to go yet and we don’t need a bigot in the oval office to get us there. The color of Barack Obama’s skin should not cost him the White House. I don’t think it will. The color of his heart just might.