A pastor’s virulent concoction that denigrates

Oct 19, 2014 News

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Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

Black People and the U.S. president

By Dennis Nichols
The world is full of people who claim to understand how and why we, as humans, think, feel, and behave the way

we do. They are often very vocal in asserting it, and in societies everywhere, including Guyana, there is no shortage of dabblers and babblers when it comes to commenting on what psychologists and philosophers call ‘the human condition’.
From Plato to Freud, from the judge to the junkie, we seem to have an abundance of theories and opinions as to why we are the way we are and, why we relate to one another in such complex and often unpredictable ways. You hear them on the streets, in the markets, in offices and schools, in the newspapers, and, of course, on the internet. Have mouth, will talk; have keyboard, will type!
For me though, not being a see-far news Baccoo, or a Peeping Tom, or Kai, or Freddie, I simply wish I could look inside the hearts and minds of my fellow human beings and figure them out, whether genius or gadfly, eccentric, egotist,  criminal, or altruist.  In Guyana this would be a mixed bag – people like Lionel Luckhoo, Forbes Burnham, John Bennett, (author of an English/Arawak dictionary) my 12 year-old student from St. Barnabas Primary School who committed suicide nearly 30 years ago, and the human animal/s who killed and decapitated a man in Agricola in 2005.
Outside of Guyana there are hundreds. I’d like to know and understand what Stephen, accepted as the first Christian martyr, thought and felt as he yielded to death by stoning. What lay behind the maniacal excesses of Roman emperors like Caligula and Elagabalus, what Stephen Hawking thinks of Stephen King, what Nelson Mandela felt as he stepped out of the Victor Verster Prison into the sun’s glare on February 11, 1990, and what US President Barack Obama thinks of the Rev. James Manning, one of his biggest haters.
The last of these is of particular interest to me, since both of these gentlemen are Black and both appear to be very

intelligent, each having a charismatic and highly persuasive way of expressing himself. Manning is chief pastor of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem, NY.
I first ‘met’ James Manning about four years ago, on the internet, and at first I thought the video I was looking at was a joke, or a set-up. It took all of two minutes to realize that it was neither. I subsequently wondered whether or not this man had a programmed automaton for a brain, (and still do from time to time) something devised up by a group of ultra conservatives and KKKs who can’t bear the thought of a Black man living in a big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C.
His facial expression and speech, a kind of urban drawl, reflect his Southern roots and the very real experience of growing up Black in America. But what he says about Obama, and Black people, is something else – a tasteless concoction of perception and opinion that denigrates an entire race, including the American President.
Derision, invective, and paradox seem to be Manning’s forte in delivering his frequent rants about Obama and Black people. He generalizes about Black people everywhere (but more so in the US and in Africa) as being ignorant, lazy, lascivious, and responsible for whatever adversity they find themselves in. Black people, he asserts, don’t understand the world, and posits, for example that there isn’t ‘two cents worth of difference’ between a mass murderer or a petty thief in prison and a Black doctor, when it comes to this crucial perception. Ironically, Manning admits that as a youngster, he was involved in criminal activities similar to those he now decries in African-Americans, including burgling about 100 homes and threatening

an associate with a shotgun
He emphatically declares he is not a Black man, and don’t you dare call him an AFRICAN-American. He notes that in ‘that big ole continent of Africa’ they never built one boat that was sea-worthy … never built one monument (except for Egypt which he claims is not Africa) nor any great cities. He declares that turning South Africa over to Mandela has resulted in disease and crime that is ‘running wild in Johannesburg’ even as he condescends to acknowledge that ‘apartheid had some brutality in it’.  When Mandela, who he claims didn’t believe in God, passed earlier this year, he mockingly proclaimed ‘The fool is dead.’
But his most pejorative vitriol is reserved for President Obama, his wife and his ancestry. He continuously refers to Obama, whom he says is Kenyan, not American, as a pimp, a long-legged mack daddy (think women and sex) and the son of Satan. However he also believes he is gay, and recently posted a sign outside his church which says that ‘Obama has released the homo demons on the Black man’. Michelle, whom he calls the fist-bumper, is King Kong’s sister, Obama’s mother was ‘White trash’ and his father a pathetic alcoholic bigamist. He advises however that he has now opened his mind to the possibility that Barack Obama Sr., is not the president’s father, but someone called Frank Marshall Davis, an American.
Interestingly, one of the reasons he says Obama isn’t fit to be president is that he is only half-Black, and that a Black president should come from a Black womb. Manning stereotypes Black people as being worthless yet upholds the virtues of Black icons like Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner – the last a Virginian slave preacher who led an uprising that killed 60 whites and led to retaliatory actions by Whites that killed about 200 Blacks.
The piqued pastor sometimes appears incensed by the notion that maybe Obama has never even heard of him although he once held a show trial at his church where he prosecuted the president for wire fraud and opined that he should be hanged. Obama’s apparent indifference seems to have gotten Manning’s goat.
The Reverend James David Manning has spewed much more venom about President Obama and Black people than can be even alluded to here in this brief ‘story’. I think it’s safe to say that he despises certain ‘types’ although he claims he really loves Black people, and wants to help them face the truth about themselves. (He excluded?) But of course being just an armchair analyst, I’m not absolutely sure. I’d love to hear what others think – maybe Freddie, one of ‘dem boys’ or the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. According to Manning, Putin will soon reveal some titillating information about the leader of the free world. Stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath.

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