Posted on 04/03/2008 3:02:08 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Virtually every dialogue about race is so loaded with sensitivity, anger, and pain among both blacks and whites that the language employed is predominantly the language of political correctness. This is a language of people fearful of misspeaking or being misunderstood, who worry about choosing the wrong words when they are just trying to be honest. Two classic instances followed each other: Geraldine Ferraro suggesting that part of Sen. Barack Obama's political pre-eminence was due to his race (which upset his supporters) and Obama referring to his white grandmother's prejudices as those of a "typical white person" (which upset many whites).
Gaffes like these are magnified by an intense media focus—even though it's fair to say the media have been reluctant to challenge Obama so far.
Obama's recent speech on race, which came as an attempt to defuse the dangerous controversy associated with sermons from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, also reflected the complexities facing us. It provoked unusually divergent reactions. Obama supporters extolled the portions that dealt openly and thoughtfully with the broader issue of race in America. They were satisfied that Obama said he doesn't buy into Wright's divisive message. For Obama's critics, the speech did not deal clearly, and for some even accurately, with Obama's more-than-20-year relationship with his pastor.
Facing the issue. Obama's speech was heartfelt and, for the most part, direct. He dealt head-on with the anger that both the African-American community and whites often express in private. Obama described the resentment within the white community over programs intended to improve the lot of African-Americans—many of which began just when the living standards of the white middle and working classes began to erode. He talked about the older generation of blacks who remembered the open racism of Jim Crow laws and the difficulties that accompanied the exodus of African-Americans from the South to the urban areas of the North and West. And how those hardships were exploited by some politicians who encouraged a culture of victimization, which in turn prevented many in the black community from dealing with their own responsibilities for their condition. As the writer Abigail Thernstrom pointed out, Senator Obama's statement that the Reverend Wright has a "profoundly distorted view" rejected the notion of paralyzing black victimization and recognized that the challenges that African-Americans face today have more complicated causes than racism.
I've long been astounded by how difficult it is for outsiders to understand the emotional history of the African-Americans and how it affects them to this day. Two illustrations will suffice. One involved a conversation with a major black urban political leader who said he could never support the police because the police beat him and his friends up when he was a child. Another involved an outstanding national leader who justified his cautious policies on the belief that, as the first African-American to fulfill such a particular national position, he couldn't afford to take any risks.
But Senator Obama also spoke to the anger that exists within segments of the white working and middle class who didn't benefit from the fact that they were white. Like immigrants, they had to build everything from scratch and work hard for it all of their lives. Their resentments grew when programs like busing and affirmative action gave preferences to African-Americans that whites never received and when they were told their fears about the explosion of urban crime somehow or other reflected racial prejudice. Obama acknowledged these concerns are legitimate and not necessarily racist for, as he noted, "most working- and middle-class Americans don't feel they have been particularly privileged by their race."
As someone who witnessed firsthand the busing crisis in Boston and its perception as an injustice by Boston's ethnic working classes—Irish, Italians, Portuguese, and Asians—I saw a resentment inspired not so much by the busing of blacks into white schools but by the busing of their children into black schools and neighborhoods. The resentment was inflamed by the fact that the decision and opinion makers, be they in the courts or the leading newspapers, were elites who lived in the suburbs with no connection to the human pain of busing. So it was a relief to see Obama's understanding of how these people reacted. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal rightly described this part of Obama's remarks as "a thinking man's speech."
This is not to say that Obama doesn't support these programs. He believes government should take race and gender into account in university admissions, hiring, and contracting; he opposes any state initiatives that would prohibit using racial preferences to promote diversity; he supports busing and decried the Supreme Court rulings that limited it, so much so that he vowed "to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the constitutional importance of Brown," the school desegregation ruling.
On the issue of his admiring relationship with his described mentor and pastor, Obama was less forthcoming. He failed to explain why for two decades he allied with a pastor of such convictions unless he didn't regard them as loathsome. Pastor Wright, after all, continually delivered sermons that were hate filled, paranoid, and anti-American. He asserted that America got its "just desserts" on 9/11 and was morally responsible for the attack because of, among other crimes, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though our purpose was to end the war imposed on the United States. The "chickens were coming home to roost," Wright said. He has also promoted a series of fantastical claims, including that the U.S. government gave drugs to black people presumably to enslave them or imprison them and that the government invented aids as an instrument of genocide against people of color. He slurred Italians as "garlic noses" responsible for Jesus's "lynching." Just last year, Wright honored the radical Louis Farrakhan and, as part of a virulently anti-Israel stance, published an article in his pastor's letter giving a platform to Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy leader of Hamas and a known terrorist.
Close adviser. What many people are saying privately, if not publicly, is that they do not understand how a man who gives speeches about moving past the racial divide would choose such a minister and make him virtually a member of his family and his "sounding board" during two decades. Pastor Wright was one of the first people Obama thanked after his election to the Senate; he consulted him before deciding to run for the presidency; and then he selected him as his spiritual adviser.
Contrast this with Senator Obama's reaction when radio host Don Imus uttered his infamous slur of blacks last year. Then, Obama didn't hesitate to say Imus should be fired and asserted, "There is nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made any comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group." But when it came to Pastor Wright, he passed him off as "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." This kind of double standard raises serious questions.
Pastor Wright was not some cranky old uncle. He was a public preacher, endorsed by Obama with his continued presence. And a senator and now presidential candidate isn't just an ordinary church member. Doesn't such a public figure as Obama have an obligation to denounce anti-American bigotry as well as those who praise bigots? Wasn't he aware that this kind of preaching doesn't just affect adults but infects and exposes a younger generation to precisely the kinds of racism that Obama says he is committed to transcending? Doesn't it undermine his role as a racial healer when he implies that the inflammatory comments of his pastor were somehow made understandable by history? What else could be justified by this logic?
No one suggests that Obama shares his minister's rage or his deep disgust with America. But many can reasonably say that if any presidential candidate had remained a member of the congregation of a white minister who had preached sermons using the "N" word and espoused the views of the Ku Klux Klan, the public and the press would have been all over the candidate. And then appoint the same hatemonger to serve on a religious advisory committee for a presidential campaign? The result would have been a public firestorm.
And in comparing his unwillingness to abandon his minister, just as he said he would not have abandoned his own white grandmother, Obama ignored the difference between breaking with a relative whose home you occupied as a child and distancing yourself from a religious mentor whom you selected as an adult. You don't choose your grandmother, but you do choose your pastor and your church.
In his speech, Obama finally rejected his pastor's radical views and stated that Wright's incendiary language has the potential to "not only widen the racial divide but...it denigrated both the greatness and goodness of our nation." Alas, he also admitted what he previously had denied, to wit, that he was present when Pastor Wright made some of these outrageous comments. What would have happened to any other presidential candidate who might have admitted such an inconsistency?
Much of Obama's speech covering 400 years of race relations in America was remarkable and thoughtful. It served to reassure many white voters that they had been right in not tuning him out the way they had tuned out other black candidates. It would have been more reassuring, though, if the speech had not come in the context of damage control, for it left the impression that Obama was broadening the subject to all race relations to deflect questions about his two-decade involvement with a radical anti-American.
Nevertheless, Obama's speech clearly affected many Americans who seek to advance the stultified dialogue on race relations. It helped us learn from our history and understand the experience of others. Senator Obama's formidable rhetorical talents and manifest intellectual skills should enable him to address other difficult subjects in what is clearly a brilliant future in public life.
I would say this to my wife or mother and mean it. If you vote for Obama or Hillary you are stupid. Neither of these people are fitting for anything of a public service nature.I trust Jeremiah Wright or Louis Farraken more than either of them. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are even more credible.
It was hard on the mean streets of....Honolulu.
I mostly live with pretty conservative (and white) folk. I have no idea what "the anger......whites often express in private" refers to, though I can guess what he's trying to say. Conservative white folk are mostly way to busy to bother making comments. The dirtiest most racist language from whites I've heard in the last 30 years was from Democrat Al Gore voters that I worked with in Chicago.
:.He is a descendant of Slavers
“No one suggests that Obama shares his minister’s rage or his deep disgust with America.”
I do!
Obama is a fraud. He is bamoozlin people who should know better. His choice of association, votes and commentaries lead to only one conclusion. He and his wife are ignorant, cunning black racist socialists, packaging themselves as something else. There is no evidenc whatsoever that the OBAMAs understand or appreciate the center, much less the right.
OBAMA will never be my President!
The ascendancy of Barack He Whose Middle Name May Not Be Spoken Obama is the realization of the efforts of all the Cultural Marxists whose ideas were nurtured by the Gramcians who set up the Frankfurt School and spawned cultural radicals like Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adorno. Their intellectual progeny are thoroughly ensconced in the MSM, academia, Hollywood, and most importantly in the George Soros directed modern day Democratic Party which is the nest for all the Vipers on the left, the racial identity determininists, the radical feminists, the sexual deviationist lobby, the “watermelon” environmentalists, the open borders crowd and the anti-war seditionists who seek to steal from our magnificent armed forces the victory that they have earned with their blood and valor in the SAME MANNER as they stole our hard earned victory from those of us who are Vietnam vets.
Their apotheosis is the religion of Obama, the Lucifer deceiver who would lead this great nation to Fabian Socialist HELL!!!
Should Barack He Whose Middle Name May Not Be Spoken Obama get a compliant Democrat Congress and Senate, the damage done to this country and to liberty as we have known it, would be incalculable. He is the most dangerous presidential candidates since Henry Wallace. Please check this link. It will tell you all that you need to know. There is credible info that could lead one to believe that his Indonesian stepfather to him to Mosque with the intent of making him Muslim. His own campaign said in a LA Time article that he was never a REGULARLY practicing Muslim, leading one to infer that he was an IRREGULARLY practicing Muslim. That is enough for the Muzzies to convict him as an apostate or to accept him as one of the faithful deceiving the dhimmis. Check the years 1971-1973 at the link below.
http://www.freedomsenemies.com/_more/obama.htm
Obama’s lies about his relationship with his racist, America hating Marxist pastor, lies about the Kennedy’s funding his father’s education, lies about his parents being inspired to mate by the Selma march, lies bout his role in crafting ultra liberal (Marxist) policy positions, lies about his economic advisor meeting with Canadian officials; all point to ONE conclusion. This guy must obsfucate and conceal what he truly is so as to deceive the electorate. As the syndicalist George Sorel, one of the seminal intellectual influences of Mussolini’s Fascism, which is a progenitor of modern day liberalism taught that myth (lies) “are artificial combinations invented to give the appearance of reality to hopes that inspire men in their present activity.”
In other words, lying for his liberally relativistic form of justice.
The No. 1 point and fact in that speech was Obama’s sandwiched-in admission that, contrary to his earlier assertion, he was present for at least some of Wright's hate speeches.
Obama’s staff, incidentally, continues to refuse to make known the specific dates that Obama was at the church.
EMAIL THESE LINKS OUT **NOW** TO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS AHEAD OF THE PENNSYLVANIA AND PUERTO RICO PRIMARIES!!
Obama’s Pastor Celebrates 9/11 (explicit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzhl-endvco
Obama’s Racially-Divisive Pastor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUbUBTlmAiA
Obama Disrespecting U.S. Flag and Anthem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8QCkgg5Kjo
The Audacity of Barack Obama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjnT4eJJvs
The Audacity of Barack Obama 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeC8BE-2T_k
Is Obama Wright? - Pastor Wright & Senator Obama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72B3tUAqpo4
Obama’s Pastor - 9/11 Fault of Israel Association
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnI431s1r6s
Obama - Cult of Personality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP7lUGn7HWk&;;;;;;;
Name Obama’s Accomplishments if you can #1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGeu_4Ekx-o
Name Obama’s Accomplishments if you can #2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzFOOcEQtP0
Barack Obama: There Will Be Bamboozling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuB_W8o_UsU
The Two Things Senator Obama Accomplished
http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/02/27/obamas-empty-change-message/
The Jeremiah Wright Lifetime Achievement Award
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prhnc2fxAzg
Obama — We Are Building A Religion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xtNr5-up0U
The Obama File
http://www.freedomsenemies.com/_more/obama.htm
I do!
I do, too ! Somehow that line got deleted from my post...
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