III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 111WRIGHT’S $1.6 MILLION MANSION IN A RICH WHITE GATED COMMUNITY
Wright himself was apparently taken underground by the Obama campaign, who did not want
this racist provocateur doing any media interviews. Speculation was rife on right-wing talk radio
that the racist reverend had been sequestered by Axelrod, and that he now slept with the fishes. In
reality, he was ensconced at a luxury resort hotel in the Caribbean. Then it became known that
Wright was about to move into a newly constructed $1.6 million mansion in the Chicago suburbs in
a gated community where the black population was less than 2%. He was reported to enjoy a $10
million line of credit provided by Trinity United. His Porsche was in the garage. Wright was not an
ascetic.
Wright is also a highly political reverend, who gets around to the Gamaliel Foundation’s
schedule of conferences. On June 21-22, 2007, for example, Gamaliel held its “African-American
Leadership Conference” in Pittsburgh under the theme of “Uniting for Power.” The keynote speaker
was none other than Jeremiah Wright. At this conference, Reverend John C. Welch of Pittsburgh
made a thinly veiled call to mobilize politically for Obama: “I hope that when you leave you will
also have a plan for your cities so that collectively we can make sure that this country will undergo
an unprecedented cosmetic surgery in the 2008 presidential election,” said Welch. Welch was right:
an Obama presidency, as is argued in this book, would constitute nothing more than a cosmetic
makeover or facelift for a moribund empire. The goal needs to be to turn away from the path of
empire and return to the ways of the constitutional republic. But Obama is too much of a puppet to
be able to contemplate that route.
When Otis Moss III, who replaced Wright at Trinity United, took advantage of the national
attention focused on Trinity United to devote his Easter Sunday sermon to defending Wright from
what he termed a “crucifixion.” The point was that the affirmative action beneficiary needed above
all things to cultivate the metaphysical pose of the eternal victim – in order to get more grants. One
was reminded of a right-wing reactionary who had benefited from affirmative action (even if he
proposed to remove it for others). This was Clarence Thomas, who told his 1992 Senate
confirmation hearings that he had been the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” Otis Moss III had gone
to college at Morehouse College thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM: THE CYNICAL USES OF IDENTITY POLITICS
The activities of the Ford Foundation and the other foundations for which it serves as a flagship
do not represent the first time that racial issues have been cynically used for the pursuit of political
ends. The leader of the National Socialist movement will always be associated with the most
virulent exploitation of crackpot race doctrines which furnished the staples of his demagogy. But it
is also interesting to note that even this greatest racist of the 20th century was fully aware that the
concept of race was a fraud and a sham. Here is Hitler in an unguarded moment speaking to
Hermann Rauschning, the leader of the Nazi movement in Gdansk or Danzig, sometime in the
autumn 1934:
The conception of the nation has become meaningless. The conditions of the time compelled
me to begin on the basis of that conception. But I realized from the first that it could have only
transient validity. The ‘nation’ is a political expedient of democracy and liberalism. We have
to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race, which has not yet
been politically used up. The new order cannot be conceived in terms of national boundaries of
the peoples with an historic past, but in terms of race which transcends those boundaries. All