So now, it seems the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retired though he may be, has inspired a whole new revival via YouTube and Google.

Too bad many of the white people who are doing the searching aren’t looking for ways to understand, but for reasons to condemn.

Wright, as any hermit in the Himalayas must surely know by now, is the former pastor of Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama. In a controversy that illustrates, in a big way, why election time is called the “silly season,” detractors have sought to cast a shadow over his candidacy by linking him to Wright.

Some have painted Obama as a fellow traveler of sorts for continuing to attend Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It was, after all, a church in which the pastor wasn’t speaking in tongues about how good America had been to black folks; a pastor who, among other things, suggested that black people ought to be singing “God damn America,” instead of “God Bless America.”

Last week, in a brilliant, Lincolnesque speech, Obama responded. But even as he is struggling to move on, white conservative pundits seem to be trying to make Wright and the black church the latest target of their neo-McCarthyism -- the kind that likens any chastisement of the American system as being tantamount to treason.

To them, such chastisement amounts to “hate speech.” Some have been railing on about black churches and what can be done.

Their ignorance and insensitivity regarding black people is maddening.

First of all, Wright and many other black preachers aren’t preaching hate. They aren’t telling black people to scorn white people, but to remember that a country in which they were denied full participation in for most of its 231 years still has a lot to answer for when it comes to racial justice and fairness. And the vehicle that Wright and many other black preachers use to deliver their messages is something that is known as prophetic language.

Prophetic language, by its very nature, is designed to deliver truths in a gut-wrenching and provocative way. It isn’t supposed to be wimpy or polite.

Wright, for example, once talked about how rapes and disappearances of black women go virtually uncovered, while disappearances of pretty white women stay in the news for months and years.

Of Natalee Holloway, the blond teenager who disappeared in Aruba in 2005, he said: "One 18-year-old white girl from Alabama gets drunk on a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and 'gives it up' while in a foreign country, and that stays in the news for months!"
 
Wright’s words were harsh. Yet it’s a fact that white women who disappear get more coverage than black ones. Holloway’s friends and other witnesses have also said that she was drinking the entire time she was in Aruba, and had been doing Jell-O shots and other shots the night she left Carlos and Charlie’s -- a nightclub -- with two strangers.

He didn’t say that black people should hate Natalee Holloway. His message was that something is terribly wrong when the news media places more value on the disappearance of a blond white girl who acted irresponsibly than it does to any black woman who turns up missing.

And it is.

Yet some white pundits are arrogant enough to think black people aren’t supposed to hear truths about their own existence and their own history if those truths upset white people.

That’s scary -- because if black preachers are stymied from delivering forceful sermons that reflect the frustrations and realities of their black congregants, if they ultimately have to worry about government persecution via the Internal Revenue Service because some white guy doesn’t like what was said and tries to paint it as political speech, black people will lose. The black church is, after all, still the closet where we go to collectively scream about our ongoing struggles in America.

Now, instead of trying to figure out what’s behind our screams, the people whose insensitivity is provoking it want to seal the closet door.

We can’t let that happen.