What Change Will Obama Make?

James Hal Cone

James Cone is the intellectual mentor of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ (UCC). Cone is a central figure in the development of black liberation theology in the United States, a radical critique of the role of race in America. Black liberation theology is a theology of liberation, particularly the liberation of African-Americans from social, political, and economic oppression. Reverend Jeremiah Wright absorbed many of Cone’s ideas while he was a student at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.

Black liberation theology is inextricably preoccupied with historical injustices, particularly slavery and various forms of racial discrimination experienced by African-Americans over the course of American history. It also holds current white society responsible for past injustices, as evidenced by calls for black reparations. However, the movement arose in an era when American society began to address many of these historical forms of racial discrimination and eliminate them from the official or public realm. While racism continues to exist today on personal level among some segments of American society, both white and black, it has been virtually eliminated from governmental or institutional policies.

Black liberation theology has two distinct philosophical and political threads. One aspect of it involves group empowerment which promotes the idea of the right of self-definition, self-affirmation and self-determination. The other aspect is Marxist in its orientation, which seeks revolutionary transformation of society to effectuate a radical redistribution of wealth. In Cone’s words, the black intellectual's goal is to "aid in the destruction of America as he knows it."

It is this radical critique which drives Cone’s philosophy as interpreted by Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It also permeates the thinking of Barack Obama’s wife Michelle, who absorbed these ideas from Wright and from coursework in African-American studies at Princeton University, African-American Studies being a politically charged field with an overwhelmingly leftist slant. Indeed, as presently constituted, it would be inaccurate to describe African-American Studies as an intellectual discipline at all, but primarily a form of indoctrination masquerading as scholarship. Alternative, or conservative, views are absent from most black or African Studies departments, if not systematically excluded, ir order to streamline the process of indoctrination.

Excluded from consideration in black studies departments and the writings of James Cone is the fact that African-Americans have experienced more economic prosperity in the past forty years than at any time in the history of the world, a success due almost entirely to the operation of the free market, capitalist economy and to the rights and freedoms we all share as Americans.

Jason Byassee, of The Christian Century Magazine, discussed the relationship between James Cone and Trinity United Church of Christ in May, 2007:

"There is no denying, however, that a strand of radical black political theology influences Trinity [UCC]. James Cone, the pioneer of black liberation theology, is a much-admired figure at Trinity. Cone told me that when he's asked where his theology is institutionally embodied, he always mentions Trinity. Cone's groundbreaking 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power announced: "The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people. . . . All white men are responsible for white oppression. . . . Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.'. . . Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to further enslavement." Contending that the structures of a still-racist society need to be dismantled, Cone is impatient with claims that the race situation in America has improved. In a 2004 essay he wrote, "Black suffering is getting worse, not better. . . . White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even though black people are dying daily from its poison" (in Living Stones in the Household of God)."

The sermons to which Barack and Michelle Obama listened over the course of their twenty-year membership at Trinity were undoubtedly expressions of James Cone's black liberation theology as filtered through the mind and voice of Jeremiah Wright.

And, to paraphrase Lee Cary, who has observed in an article in The American Thinker (February 22, 2008):

Michelle Obama's recent statement about pride-in-country is thoroughly consistent with both the Afrocentric theology of Trinity UCC and with the black theology of their spiritual mentors (Wright and Cone). Her efforts to explain what she meant by her statement have, so far, been vague. The less she says, the better it will be for her husband's campaign. The more she elaborates on what she meant, the more damage she could do to his candidacy.

In the wake of her statement, some commentators were quick to respond with wonderment that she wasn't proud of such geo-political milestone events like the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the USSR, the liberation of Kuwait, as well as, on a personal level, her elite education and the election of her husband to the U.S. Senate.

What they don't understand is that, while Barack is the softer, social justice side of black liberation theology, Michelle is the harder anti-white-supremacy side:

- The fall of the Berlin Wall was a seminal event in the battle between two white racist, oppressive political-economic systems. What's to be proud of there?

- The fall of the USSR was merely the victory of one racist system that has long exploited poor, non-white, Third World countries with economic colonialism over another system similarly guilty. What's to be proud of in that victory? Both brought havoc and death upon the surrogate countries when their Cold War battles turned hot.

- The liberation of Kuwait, too, falls into the category of white supremacist politicians exercising U.S. military power over an oil-rich region of the world. What's to be proud of there?

- And, the idea that her education should be a matter of pride could be heard as having a condescending tone that suggests she should be proud because she, a black woman, earned degrees generally reserved for whites.

These responses would be thoroughly consistent with Cone's theology -- the mentor of the Obamas' spiritual mentor. Cone's myopic theological worldview looks solely through the prism of his understanding of the experience of Blacks in America as victims of white oppression.

This is what Michelle Obama absorbed from Cone through Wright and from her Princeton indoctrination at the hands of her African-American Studies professors. Scary? You bet!

More on Cone:

James H. Cone on Wikipedia.