By: Jeremiah Wright
In the New York City speech Sept. 17, 2009, Wright, President Barack Obama’s pastor for about 20 years, once again reveals his disdain and lack of respect for the United States of America as he identified his belief in black-liberation theology with the Marxist ideology that is central to the Monthly Review.
Calling the United States, “the land of the greed and the home of the slave,” Wright’s antipathy to the United States was clear from how he described his personal history.
“My background consists of childhood experiences in racist America; teenage years in a segregated country that has never apologized for slavery; college years which were molded in the cauldron of the sit-ins in Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy; six years in the military which showed me the inside and the underside of the beast Martin Luther King called ‘the Number One purveyor of violence on the planet,'” Wright said as began to explain his “social location” to the audience.
Citing the importance of Karl Marx and the Marxist ideology to his own intellectual history, Wright stressed the importance of his exposure to revolutionary socialist political parties in Latin America, including the FMLN in El Salvador and Sandinistas in Nicaragua, as well as a 1984 trip with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to visit Muammar Gadhafi in Libya.
“If I help a homeless child, they will call me a saint,” he explained, “but if I ask why there are homeless, they will call me a socialist. That’s what Martin Luther King said he was. I will be proud to be called a socialist because I want to know why in this country there are homeless.”
Wright maintained racism was built into the Constitution in that Africans were defined as “property, not people” and said it was an environment in which “property trumped people.”
He also called for a “New World Socialist Order” in which the U.S. legal system would be reconstituted in favor of the poor.