Frankly, just about everything I've heard from Rev. Wright is offensive. I don't even know where to start.

What was wrong with what Wright said? Right after 9/11, he was blaming America for the attacks. As a New Yorker, as someone who saw the thick smoke rise from downtown, it is sickening. He blames white men of creating the AIDS virus. That is ignorance. It goes beyond that. This man is Obama's spiritual adviser and mentor. He married him and baptized his children. Obama listened to him for 20 years. Obama wants us to judge him on his judgments and this makes it very difficult for me. Wright may have some honest things to say and some of it may be right, but this is a man of the church preaching to his people divisive words that does not heal wounds or try to bring people together, but make those wounds deeper and separate us. And you know what, Hillary has never been called a nigger, but she has been called a bitch, and a whore and she fought hard to get where she is today.

fetishism that Wright expressed that discussed me the most.  

On the race question, it seems that you misunderstand Jerome as much as you think he misunderstands you.  To me, Wright's comments are racist for this exact point.  I have never been anything but for all things empowerment, be it affirmative action, be it civil rights in general.

Wright is completely willing to group me and everything that I believe and stand for into a single homogeneous group that is 'white'.  That, is the fundamental aspect of all racism- the basic stereotype.

Well, Mr. Wright and all those who don't think that his comments are racist or offensive, I am more than the color of my skin.

I think that when Wright blamed white people for giving black people AIDS, it was clearly offensive. That statement he said is not worth defending.

wright's comments are outrageous and offensive, when much like islamic terrorists he invokes God's name to "damn" america..

The sentiments expressed in this diary will be reasons why Obama will lose if Democrats choose him as their nominee.  These feelings only serve to racially polarize this country even more than it is currently polarized.  

ok, here's what i don't like about wright's statements. he believes:

this is crazy talk. it's as crazy as the pseudoscience the white bigots use to "prove" their claim that whites are superior.

all wright needs to say is that white were developed from blacks by an evil scientist using genetic experiments, and he'll have the full farrakan trifecta.

I've responded in the post.

created AIDS to kill off Blacks??? (he forgot about the gays, obviously the U.S created it to kill them! DUH!)

your life experience because I'm not black.

I suspect that you can't begin to understand my life experience because you're not white.

Isn't that the common ground that we're all trying to find?

I think you are wrong, but I am rec'ing your diary.  I hope you can get the dialogue you seem to be looking for.

I am happy that Jerome has responded to you!!

God Damn America, and the US created AIDS to wipe out blacks?  And you are asking Jerome what is wrong with what Wright said?  Give me a damn break.

Rev. Wright said "God damn America for treating its citizens as something less than human".  And I would agree.  Whenever any of us treat each other as something less than the ourselves, God should damn us.  If we are to be damned by anything, it should be that.

If you have to ask, you haven't a clue about the larger culture you live in.

and the only thing that I view as patently false is the idea that AIDS was developed specifically to exterminate black people.

you respond above by saying that we don't know for sure where HIV comes from, but cmon, thats not an argument. It is widely believed that it was a mutation from primates in Sub-Saharan Africa.

however i definitely agree with your larger arguments.

I think it is largely about white people being scared of black identity. I think of it like this: if the 24 cable networks with Wright using the EXACT same tone and EXACT same forceful preaching style that reminds them of black nationalism in style it would scare the shit out of white people regardless of the content.

the content is an excuse for the image of a strong, angry, black pastor demanding justice.

just my opinion.

I was open to what you were saying in the first part of your post, but when you got to "Stuff White People Like" in relation to Jerome talking about his experience in the Peace Corps, you lost me. What a nasty, cynical, petty way for you to end the post.

sincere responses to your question.   I'll try to do it though.  
The history of race in this country is an abomination.   Horrible things were done by the ancestors of many white people living today.   My ancestors owned slaves and I'm sorry to say I don't know how they treated them.   On the other hand, many white people living today are the descendants of Jews persecuted in Europe, or the Irish persecuted by the English (I'm in that bucket too), or other oppressed groups, and these people's ancestors did not own slaves or contribute in any way to the oppression of black people.   So we all have to consider how long guilt is supposed to last.   How many generations down the road?    

Secondly, I grew up in the South and I've seen racism first hand.   It is ugly.   On the other hand, in the last FORTY years the South has made some improvements.   The races do mix there as friends and colleagues (though maybe not in church or around the kitchen table).  When I lived there I had several black friends and I did attend black churches which I always loved.   They were not hate-based.   Were they "uncle toms"?  Maybe.  As a white person I don't claim to know the insides of the black soul.  

However, as a woman I think my experience has some parallels with the black experience.   Girls, too, are denigrated by the larger culture (or at least they were back in the 50s and 60s, explicitly).   There are a lot of mean-spirited words for women (the "C" word and the "P" word -- synonym for cat) are not related to behavior but just used to describe any woman you want to insult.   There's also "chick" and "broad" which are not as deeply insulting as the N word but not very nice either.  

Women are the victims of intense violence, domestic violence as well as random predatory violence, as we see every night in the news.   Women have many reasons to fear the world, and to have paranoid theories about who is "out to get them".  Look at how Britney Spears & Paris Hilton & Lindsay Lohan are trashed in the press for doing what a lot of young men do without anyone commenting.   So, therefore, I think I know how it feels to be demeaned by a larger culture who seems to hold all the cards while I hold none.   Can this cause hate?  Yes it can.   Can this cause weird paranoid theories to erupt?   Yes it can.

So, back to race and my own burden.   I have lived an ordinary life -- not one of public service -- but I have taken every opportunity that presented itself to have black people in my life because I love their contribution.  I love the culture.   Without trying to stereotype here, I recognize the contribution of blacks to music and the joyfulness that comes in praising the universe in song.    I love the black sense of humor, like the jewish sense of humor sometimes unexpected to my whitebread sensibilities and so that much funnier.  I had a black boyfriend in 1976, in the South, who was a beautiful person.   He was rich, his mother drove a Mercedes.  I was poor and felt inadequate in their presence.   A role reversal, but nothing of particular note.   Even 30 years ago, there in the South, it was not that unusual for blacks and whites to be together.  

When I go back home to visit my dad in the South, the contours look different than they are here on the west coast.   Black people are everywhere, dressed like me and acting like me.    They live ordinary middle class lives, go to work, contribute to city and state governments, education, teach in colleges, have professional medical and legal practices, science, the arts, music, and sports.  They donate to worthy causes, they go to the sunday ice cream social and yell for their kids at little league and peewee football.  They eat hotdogs and popcorn and drink Starbucks lattes, just like white people do.   And I find it difficult to believe that ALL of these people walk around with their hearts full of hate.  

But maybe I'm wrong.  

I'm not offended by him saying them.  It's a free country, mostly.  I think I might have been offended by some of those things if I were attending the church at that time, but it depends on the context.  I don't remember verbatim what he said and what is important, we didn't hear the whole sermon.

I'm not offended by someone saying their own opinion or what they feel no matter how strongly I disagree with them.  It's better to listen and think about it.. at least, if they're saying something you haven't heard before (a lot of comments on the internet don't fall into this category..) rather than jump to take offense and take no interest in why they're saying it and where they're coming from.

I do get offended when a speaker speaks in a way that makes the audience complicit in what they are saying, that deliberately assumes the audience agrees completely with what they are saying, and requires, if you don't agree, that you make a statement right there (maybe by walking out) to show that you are not complicit and not part of what the speaker assumes.

That is a bit complicated, but.. philosophically, right now, if I were in that church and Rev. Wright was giving a sermon, on his views and how he reads the Bible and how he views America, I'm not offended by that.  Even if he's trying to teach me those things, I'm not offended by that.  But if he's up there saying WE believe these things, sometimes I might be offended (for lack of a better word) and might have to walk out, I'd just feel like I would have to express that I don't believe them.  I get offended much more by political speeches telling us what WE all think, than I do about a sermon trying to teach me something, or tell me something, no matter what it might be.

Also.. I wonder about the implications of his (or any other person's) role when preaching to his congregation.. The sermons, what do they do?  What are they for?  Are they bringing his congregation something positive, all told?  Are they expressing negative emotions and not giving them anything to do or anywhere to go, from that?  Are they building a tight knit community around these views but closing that community off from others?  Or are they leading the community to.. something positive and uplifting, in the end?  I don't pretend to know the answers here.

OK, I'll give it a shot.

A simple question- what was so offensive about what Rev. Wright said?

The primary issues here is that your question is one that can't ever be answered to your satisfaction. Several people have given thoughtful answers, but you have dismissed each of them as incomplete or unsatisfactory.  The fault lies in your expectations of the answer. People tend to be offended on a gut, emotional level - it's visceral. Some comments can reach inside you and twist in your stomach - you're offended.  It isn't usually a logical reaction, and it's often impossible to explain it to another person. It's like asking why someone finds something funny.  How do you answer that question?

Your question isn't simple at all. It quite complex and I doubt most people would be able to clearly articulate the reasons for feeling as they do. That doesn't invalidate their feelings, as you seem to think it does.  The real question you're asking isn't "what was so offensive", but rather, "why were you offended".

Wright's comments are offensive to many people for many different reasons, but I suspect that was his goal, at least in part.  I think he really does want to move the conversation forward, but I think he ultimately fails in that. I found some of his comments to grossly irresponsible and ludicrous, especially his comments about AIDS.

I've read the response from several people referencing Tuskegee, but that's not an excuse for what Wright said.  Yes, Tuskegee happened, and there is no possible excuse for that kind of abominable behavior.  But we can't then expand that to say that AIDS was created to exterminate black people.  What about cancer? Was breast cancer created by the US government to kill off women?  High blood pressure?  It's a reprehensible thing to say, and I have no problem understanding why people are horrified by it.

Your explanation that we don't know where AIDS came from, and therefore Wright's comment was so terribly outré is ridiculous on its face. We have significant scientific evidence about that, and even if we didn't, Wright has exactly zero evidence to support his claim. That offends me because it's nothing more than propaganda of the worst sort.  This kind of inflammatory rhetoric doesn't help advance our cause.

I like how he said he was in the Peace Corps in Africa, therefore "whatever fascination or feeling of difference simply from skin color I had from growing up in the US, was replaced by a deeper bond of human familiarity."

As an African born immigrant, I find this pretty revealing.

...He is merely feeling the pinch of the calendar versus his love and support for HRC.  He has been growing ever-more bellicose these days, and has been making some rather stunning leaps in rhetorical balance and logic.

That's all.

I give him credit for his contributions, but lately he has been a bit unhinged.  We'll ALL get better.

I think everyone should watch this:

http://www.brainwaveweb.com/diavlogs/959 0