Barack Obama's Church

I got an email from one of my right wing friends today. It said in part:

Barack Obama mentioned during his appearance with Oprah that he belongs to the Trinity Church of Christ. Below is a link to that church's web site.

Go to that site and read what is written there. This man wants to be president of the United States. On the first page of this site you will see that this congregation has a non-negotiable commitment to Africa. No where is AMERICA even mentioned. Also, notice what color you must be should you want to join.

Click here for Trinity Church of Christ web site:

www.tucc.org/about.htm

So that got me worried that all this racist stuff would come back to bite Barack. I emailed my old pal Paul Bunyan to see what he had to say, as he's pretty good at minority issues, being a giant and all (giants still don't have equal rights in this country). Paul told me the following:

Yeah that is his church, and it's a little controversial. God forbid black people get angry about anything.

This emailer is foaming at the mouth "No where is AMERICA even mentioned." In classic style.

This church is a big deal for Obama, it's how he came to religion from a non-religious childhood, and it's very heavy on black pride and as they put it, the HISTORICAL EDUCATION OF AFRICAN PEOPLE IN DIASPORA. There is a firebrand preacher guy at the head of it, and it's a gigantic Chicago congregation.

It's dangerous stuff in a way, and Obama has had to back off from forefronting this too much. The concept is, you can counteract 10 generations of oppression by staking a claim to prior freedom in one's land of origin. But then the Outraged Masses can say it's anti-american. And they can say it's blacks-only. And both claims are true in part, if you refuse to understand the subtleties.

It reminds me of the Pryor routine in which he goes to Africa and finds there are "no niggers," in his words. What he found there was the absence, not just of oppression of blacks by whites, but the absence of the *ghost* of oppression. It opened his eyes to the american situation. There is this bind that america is in, where the history of subjugation is always present, where a black guy is always dealing with it, either fighting it or becoming it or imagining it or wondering if he's imagining it, etc. It's as though every interaction between blacks and whites is tainted by this sin.

At the risk of saying something awful, I think one reason whites can accept Obama is that he comes from a recent immigrant black origin, not a slave-descendant family. I'm not reifying Pryor's self-hatred here, and I don't think slave-history taints black people. But it does hang over the *relationship* between black and white, and Obama is partly free from that. God help me, but I think this is what Biden was saying when he said he was "clean." The flip side is that he also seems to inhabit the african-american tradition, in his speech and manner. Much more than say, Tiger does.

But anyway, yeah, Obama belongs to this pretty radical Afro-centric Black-empowerment church, which is essentially, if not literally racially-exclusive. Plus its charismatic leader is a big mentor to him. I think there will be nothing too crazy in his theology. I only hope he stares this issue down head on, cause it could be a problem.