On Mar 18, 3:44*pm, Kathy Bush > wrote:
> By Shailagh Murray
> PHILADELPHIA -- Sen. Barack Obama sought to quell the political
> firestorm stirred by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright with a deeply
> personal speech about black anger, white anger, and the gulf that race
> continues to represent in U.S. society.
>
> "Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore
> right now," Obama asserted. "We would be making the same mistake that
> Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America -- to
> simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it
> distorts reality."
>
> The 37-minute speech had consumed Obama in recent days. For the first
> time in a year, he was faced with a potentially lethal threat to his
> candidacy that was only partly within his control. Wright's racially
> charged rhetoric, a throwback the militant 1970s, threatened to
> sabotage a campaign built around the ideas of unity and change. Obama
> denounced Wright's comments when they surfaced on Friday, but he knew
> interviews wouldn't be enough. And so he began crafting today's
> speech, at once pained and unnerved by the task at hand.
>
> Obama spoke with a serious voice, reading each word carefully from the
> teleprompter. The audience sat silently until halfway through the text
> -- an eternity for an Obama event, where casual one-liners are often
> met with a standing ovation.
>
> "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from
> Kansas," Obama declared to the hushed auditorium. "And for as long as
> I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my
> story even possible," he said.
>
> In his 20s, after years of struggling with his racial identity, Obama
> began attending Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's
> South Side. It provided him with a community and identity that was
> missing in his itinerant upbringing. And after being raised by his
> white grandparents, it also brought him deeper into the African
> American fold.
>
> "As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me," said Obama
> of Wright. "He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and
> baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I
> heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat
> whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.
> He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad --
> of the community that he has served diligently for so many years."
>
> Obama again denounced the inflammatory statements that have dominated
> cable news and talk radio coverage in recent days. "Reverend Wright's
> comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we
> need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together
> to solve a set of monumental problems."
>
> But he added, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black
> community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white
> grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed
> again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves
> anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of
> black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one
> occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me
> cringe."
>
> "These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this
> country that I love."
>
> He tackled the rich subculture of the African American church
> experience. "Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of
> raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing,
> and clapping, and screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the
> untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty,
> the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and
> successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up
> the black experience in America."
>
> There also is anger. And "that anger is not always productive," said
> Obama. "But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it
> away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to
> widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."
>
> He added, "In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the
> white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't
> feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race."
>
> Wright's mistake, said Obama, "is not that he spoke about racism in
> our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no
> progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made
> it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office
> in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and
> Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a
> tragic past."
>
> http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-t...ma_speech_conf...

Wow. Nice speech.

Ralph Kennedy

"This is rsfc, not the Algonquin roundtable."
-xyzzy, 2/16/07