"Premature Autopsies" for the Unrepentant Race Man (ver. 1.0)
"If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy"--from "Premature Autopsies"
(written by Stanley Crouch; Recitation by the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.)
On his 1989 recording, Majesty of the Blues, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis paid tribute to the legacy of New Orleans Jazz. The centerpiece of the recording was a three-part suite called "The New Orleans Function." Arranged as a traditional New Orleans funeral on the occasion of "The Death of Jazz," the suite features a 16-minute sermon aptly titled "Premature Autopsies." Though "Premature Autopsies" was written by noted Jazz critic and curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, it is none other than the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who delivers the sermon on the recording. While Reverend Wright was largely unknown to most in America only two months ago, at the time he recorded "Premature Autopsies" he was already regarded among the black cultural vanguard as one of Black America's--if not America's--greatest preachers.
Like the music that Marsalis "recreated" for Majesty of the Blues, Reverend Wright's preaching was the embodiment of what some might call "classical" Black American Culture--easily recalling examples like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Louis Armstrong, Mahailia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, the latter whom serves as the primary referent throughout "Premature Autopsies." Crouch composed "Premature Autopsies," in response the sense that classical Black American Culture was under assault in the marketplace and by a dismissive generation of young Americans. The sermon gives the strongest inkling to what drives Crouch's very public criticisms of rap music and hip-hop culture. But I also submit that the passion with which Reverend Wright delivers the sermon also explains the sense of indignity that was on display during the Q&A portion of Wright's recent talk at the National Press Club.
As Crouch wrote prophetically 20 years ago, "we must understand that the money lenders of the market place have never ever known the difference between an office and an auction... they'll tell you that everything is always up for sale. They recognize no difference or distance between the sacred and the profane. For them everything is fair game to be used in their game." While there were clearly forces that designed to have the legacy and rhetoric of Reverend Wright undermine the legitimacy of Senator Barack Obama's campaign, what perhaps offended Wright and others, was the mainstream press's unwillingness to treat black theological beliefs--and I'm not saying all black theological beliefs--with the respect that sacred beliefs deserve. What seems to have offended Wright--and rightfully so--is the legions of mainstream commentators and casual observers that feel compelled to comment and judge Wright (I'm talking to you Dr. Phil) and his theological foundations without even a fleeting understanding of or interest in the tradition of Black Liberation Theology that he espouses. It is the role of white privilege in mainstream media that presumes that that which they don't know is illegitimate, as was the point of Reverend Wright's thesis of "different, but not deficient" at the Detroit NAACP gathering.
Like Crouch, who traces the "majesty of the blues" and the "noble sound' of jazz to an "artistic language that uttered its first words way back on that first day that a slave sang a new song in this new and strange land," Wright views the religious beliefs he espouses as a "faith tradition" that has its roots "past Jim Cone, past the sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the transatlantic slave trade." The name Jim Cone is in reference the groundbreaking scholarly work of Dr. James Cone, who Wright has regularly cited in recent weeks. Cone's legacy begins with the publication of his 1969 text, Black Theology and Black Power.
Cone explained to journalist Kelefa Sennah in last month's New Yorker that he was motivated by the violence that erupted in Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967 to create a theological framework that "speaks to the hurt in my community. I want a theology that would empower people to be more creative." Cone also understood, as Sennah further describes, that the "Black Christian Church" (broadly defined here) had public relations problem with regard to attracting young converts who were being drawn to Islam, Marxism and various incarnations of Black Nationalism. According to Sennah, the "urgency of [Cone's] prose reflected his anger but also his fear that the black Church was becoming obsolete." It was this tradition that Reverend Wright embraced when he ascended to the leadership of Trinity in 1972, trying to create a place and space of worship where the black church's role was as much about sacred concerns as it was secular ones--a church as committed to saving Souls as it was advocating for the political and social well-being of those Souls.
If one were to have found a VHS of one of Reverend's Wright's speeches in March of 1984, perhaps it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, particularly in contrast to the rhetoric emanating from Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan at the time (and what if YouTube existed then?), who was deemed to have damned any legitimacy to the Reverend Jesse Jackson's largely symbolic 1984 presidential campaign (though it bought a host of new voters to the polls, impacting other national, state and local elections). Reverend Wright's rhetoric then, as now, would have been perfectly in sync with the theological "race man' that has always been as the center of African-American and Black politics.
Wright only reads as out-of-touch with mainstream Black Christianity in the context of a "Black" Church that in the last decade is seen as being largely devoid of any real political engagement. In the era of Black Televangelists like Bishop T.D. Jakes, Bishop Eddie Long and Minister Creflow Dollar who espouse a "gospel of prosperity" (hence Marc Lamont Hill's brilliant turn a of a phrase: "I Bling Because I'm Happy"), real political engagement takes a backseat to wealth accumulation and at times crass materialism. This is not to negate the importance of building wealth in Black America--and the "rappers" understand this as well as anybody in the pulpit--but it helps explain why Jeremiah Wright might seem odd or even anachronistic during this election cycle. For his part Wright remains the unrepentant Race Man, even as his 15-minutes disappears into YouTube's archives.
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Comments
1.
professorf says:
The saddest part of this Wright fiasco is how it's being spun as a need for Obama and by extension African Americans to break from the "old guard." Wright, Andrew Young, and to a lesser degree Charles Rangel are poor representations of this old guard. This is due in part because of how each has been caricaturized during the course of this campaign and secondly because black media outlets simply do not have the resources to conduct well rounded assessments of these figures. Who would've thought a decade ago that Bill Moyers would have given someone like Wright the benefit of the doubt, or more importantly that BET would not have a news division to cover a campaign by a Black Presidential candidate?
06/20/2008 at 7:58 PM