104 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyand European music. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black worship is different from European
and European-American worship. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black preaching is different
from European and European-American preaching. It is not deficient. It is just different. It is not
bombastic. It is not controversial. It’s different.”
Using this boundless relativism, Wright can level good and evil, charity and hatred. He can and
did mock the “garlic-nosed” Italians, the Irish, and the music of Georg Friedrich Handel. Wright
was a great hater of Europe. As well as being the purveyor of a wholly fantastic and utopian vision
of Africa and its history, Wright was an obscurantist of the first magnitude. Obama alleged that he
had come to Christianity through Wright, but it was clear that Wright was light years distant from
Christianity. Wright was a worshipper of Ford Foundation grants, a racist provocateur and merchant
of hatred working to preserve Wall Street’s domination over American society. The only religion
that Obama could have learned at Wright’s knee was hate-based Satanism, concocted in the service
of Mammon, Pluto, and all the other gods of wealth. To make matters worse, there is no proof that
Obama was ever baptized. Chicago-based journalist, broadcaster and critic Andy Martin, when
asked about Obama’s baptism, wrote, “I have never been able to obtain any evidence that he was
baptized, although I asked for those records.”
A body of doctrine which claims to be a religion, as distinct from a political ideology, must deal
with an eternal truth growing out of the ontological situation of God and humanity in the world.
Religion is not the distillation of anybody’s specific predicament or historical experience. Cone
wants to celebrate the triumph of postmodern “cultures” over any notions of what is universal and
eternal. God is either an eternal spirit with no color at all, or is nothing. There cannot be a white god
nor a black god nor a Russian god nor a Chinese god – there can be only one universal God, unless
we wish to regress to polytheism or totemism. As soon as we have a separate god for every skin
color, religion is out the window, replaced by a kind of deus ex machina useful mainly for
propaganda purposes. If we have a black god who wants to rise up against whites, we should not be
surprised if another god appears who recommends white supremacy, soon followed by another god
who supports Serbia against Albania, still another one who is mainly concerned with global
warming, and yet another one who wants more tax cuts for the rich. God is not a figment of a
political perspective nor of a strategy for health and wealth. But Cone’s god appears to be precisely
something of this order – the embodiment of an ideology of accumulation of wealth under
conditions of affirmative action, in late US-UK imperialism.
FORD FOUNDATION THEOLOGY
Where does this pseudo-theology come from? Since the 1960s, the Ford Foundation has been a
leading agency for funding black cultural nationalism and separatism (sometimes referred to as
“pork chop cultural nationalism”) as a strategy for divide-and-conquer counterinsurgency in the
black ghetto and among economically disadvantaged inner-city populations more generally. In
these efforts, the watchwords of the Ford Foundation have been community control, local control,
and self-management. The goal is always to fragment, divide, and Balkanize the oppressed subject
populations according to every conceivable fault line of ethnicity, color, religion, national origin,
sexual preference, age, gender, and any other splinter factor that the social engineers can devise. In
this way, a general political challenge to the rule of the financiers will never emerge.
Martin Luther King, by contrast, was opposed to racial quotas during his entire career, and this
view was shared by both Robert Kennedy and by the black civil rights advocate Bayard Rustin.
Rustin wrote that “any preferential approach postulated on racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual lines