“The truth? You can’t handle the truth.” It is a memorable line from an otherwise forgettable movie, A Few Good Men. I’m reminded of the line when I listen to all of the anguish surrounding what has been said recently in certain Black pulpits,
I’m reminded that on that most segregated of hours, Sunday morning around 11, worlds separate, and what might be considered impolite or even racist comment any other time of the week, becomes recognized as the “truth” within the walls of our houses of worship.
The impetus for all of this has been some years-old snippets of sermons from Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side. Rev. Wright spoke what he believed to be the truth, from the pulpit of his church. His parishioners nodded in assent, because they also believe it to be the truth.
When he repeated some of those comments in front of 12,000 members and guests of the Detroit NAACP, they also nodded their assent, and when he repeated them again at the National Press Club, the ministers in attendance also showed their support. The truth is uncomfortable, even more uncomfortable, it seems, than lies.
The untruths are much more likely to be taken as the truth, when there is so much evidence of similar truth to use as a benchmark. When Father Michael Pfleger talked about white entitlement in the pulpit at Trinity, he didn’t say anything he wouldn’t say at his own St. Sabina. He didn’t say anything that wasn’t repeated at any number of Black churches.
And, the truth he told in his pulpit was no less the truth than what is told in the pulpit of any number of white ministers, who historically have used the pulpit, and the bible, to justify any number of racist behaviors, from owning slaves to banning miscegenation to advocating lynching. When Rev. Wright talked about AIDS being something created by the government to target people of color and the poor, he may have been wrong.
I don’t know of any particular evidence of a government conspiracy. Perhaps the government did not create AIDS. But there is no doubt the government has been slow to react to the epidemic of AIDS in the Black community, particularly the epidemic facing Black women. It seems (now this may be perception, and not truth), that the government was much more interested in AIDS when it was white boys and girls contracting it.
When Black folks can readily call up the Tuskegee experiment, where men who contracted syphilis were told that they were given treatment, when actually treatment was withheld to study the effects of the disease, it is not hard to see why some Black folks find truth in the notion that their government was not above treating them as guinea pigs.
We need only look to New Orleans, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and the complete abandonment of whole sections of that beleaguered populace by their government. President George Bush did a fly-over, while bodies (many of them Black and poor) were rotting in the streets and whole neighborhoods were rendered uninhabitable.
When the late Rev. Jerry Falwell declared of the September 11, 2001 attacks, “And I agree totally with you that the Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years. And since 1812, this is the first time that we’ve been attacked on our soil and by far the worst results %uFFFD
And with biological warfare available to these monsters%uFFFDthe Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Arafats %uFFFD what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact%uFFFDif, in fact%uFFFDGod continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve,” Rev. Pat Robertson and his followers were nodding their heads in assent.
That is the same truth that Rev. Wright mentioned. If it was wrong for Rev. Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ, it should have been wrong for Rev. Falwell and his church and his Liberty University. Your truth and my truth may not be the same.
Your truth is filtered through the prism of your own experience, and my prism comes with different facets that you may not be able to see. America cannot handle the truth.
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