III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 103idol, thus guaranteeing that no united front against the preponderance of the financiers can ever
emerge.
What is the extent of Cone’s influence? Apologists for Obama have argued that two-thirds of
black preachers in America sound like Wright, but empirical studies suggest that the real figure is
far less, perhaps one-third at the very most. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya carried out a
ten-year statistical study of the black church in America, published as The Black Church in the
African-American Experience (1990). One of the questions asked in this study dealt with black
liberation theology: “In our urban questionnaire we asked the pastors of 1,531 urban churches,
‘Have you been influenced by any of the authors and thinkers of black liberation theology?’“ It
turned out that only 34.9 percent of urban black clergy said they had been influenced by black
liberation theologians, as opposed to 65.1 percent who said they had not. Lincoln and Mamiya
found a class divide in this regard, with more affluent and educated congregations more likely to be
influenced by black liberation theology. Pastors with a high school and lower educational
background said that they were minimally influenced by liberation theology, while those with a
college education had the most positive views of the movement. The majority of the less educated
pastors had neither heard of the movement nor of the names of theologians associated with it.
Among clergy familiar with the movement, James Cone had the highest name recognition. (Ron
Rhodes, “Black Theology, Black Power, and the Black Experience”) The implication is clear: black
liberation theology is in fact an ideology of the black overclass.
FORD OPERATIVES AT TRINITY UNITED
Dwight N. Hopkins, the other named mentioned by Wright, is a professor of theology at the
University of Chicago and an ordained American Baptist minister. He teaches at the Rockefeller-
funded, right-wing elitist University of Chicago, and also teaches at Obama’s Trinity United Church
of Christ, where his students expect to be treated as his university students. During the Reverend
Wright crisis of the Obama campaign, Hopkins acted more and more as a spokesman for Wright’s
church in numerous cable television interviews. Hopkins is the “Communications Coordinator for
the International Association of Black Religions and Spiritualities, a Ford Foundation sponsored
global project,” as we learn from the Trinity United web site. Hopkins is thus an operative of the
notorious Ford Foundation, a flagship institution of the US financier oligarchy. He is also an official
of Obama’s church, and the dominant figure of Wright’s Center for African Biblical Studies.
Wright says of Hopkins: “His work covers what has transpired over the past 30 years in the area of
black theology. The developments he covers are a ‘must’ for Generation X-ers” – including,
therefore, Obama. Hopkins’ standpoint is that of a “theological interpretation of black power.” It is
the attempt to project the privileges and psychological defenses of the black overclass into the
heaven of theology, and must thus be classed as a blasphemous abuse of religion for venal and
demagogic goals.
In his notorious performance at the National Press Club in April 2008, Wright attempted to
camouflage the fact of a new synthetic religion entirely separate from Christianity behind a smoke
screen of relativism. Wright’s relativism means that all alternatives are axiomatically equal, no
matter what their quality or what their consequences for human survival might be. Wright’s
universe recalls Hegel’s description of Schelling in the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind — a
night in which everything looks the same: “The prophetic theology of the black church in our day is
preached to set African-Americans and all other Americans free from the misconceived notion that
different means deficient. Being different does not mean one is deficient. It simply means one is
different, like snowflakes, like the diversity that God loves. Black music is different from European