This post on the Belmont Club site paints a troubling picture of Rev. Wright and Black Liberation Theology. According to James Cone, one of the founders of Black Liberation Theology
Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.
In Cone’s formulation--and by extension Wright’s--any God who isn’t "black" is an agent of the devil.
The piece draws parallels between Wright and Black Liberation Theology on the one hand and the arguments advanced by the likes of Louis Farrakhan and Edward Said on the other. The press, of course, has ignored this deeper story, but all in all, the more people delve into the "theology" of Rev. Wright, the more they are going to recognize that--in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo--Obama has "got some ’splainin’ to do."
If memory serves, these theologians also claim that Jesus was black. Is that idea inherently anti-Jewish? Is it, at least implicitly, an effort to erase from memory the Jewish roots of Jesus, and hence the connection between Jews and Christians?
When questioned about his repulsive sermons by Sean Hannity, Wright cited Prof. Cone's writings as justification, demanding heatedly to know if Hannity was familiar with them--as if reading Prof. James "Whites are the enemy" Cone would make the problem magically vanish rather than simply cause more jaws to drop even further and more people to wonder about just exactly what made Barack Obama and his wife such avid devotees of this nutbar reverend and his hate-mongering ministry for so long.
As "Spengler" pointed out in the Asia Times, in a way Wright shows a touching faith in the elite liberal institutions that sponsor Cone and lend their apparent prestige to his whacked-out black-power ravings (I would cite Harvard, which had Cone deliver its Ingersoll Lecture, and Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, where Cone is tenured).
If anyone thinks that Harvard's and Union's sponsorship of this kind of venomous lunacy is going to cut a lot of ice with Latinos (many of whom are not terribly impressed with black victimization narratives to begin with) or blue-collar white voters in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, I have some oceanfront property for sale in Nebraska that I'd love to talk to you about.
I'd like to see someone ask our new messiah if Jesus was a Jew or a Black man. He'd probably get the answer right, but his hesistation before answering would betray all the political calculation occurring within him. Of course, he might not actually answer the question point blank. He might pull one of his dodges, like we saw in his rather stale speech of the other day.