Obama’s Race Speech

Here are the highlight’s from Obama’s speech and my reaction to it. The speech in its entirety can be found here. Unfortunately, this post is long, because like most good leftists, Obama likes to hear himself speak.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Sorry, but the real Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. The summer of 1787 produced a constitution. It was a framework. It was a measure to unite disparate states, who were more like independent states with unique cultures.

Mr. Obama, if the compromise over slavery had not been included in the Constitution, more than likely, the southern slave states would have gone their own way or the north and the south, divided and weaker, would have been reabsorbed into the British Empire at some point. Under the British, slavery would have continued. Under a Southern nation, slavery would have not only continued, it would have expanded and been more deeply entrenched.

The Declaration of Independence, which laid the Lockean ideas of equity as our nation’s foundation was included in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights, which was made possible by compromise over slavery. The ideas of individual rights is what lead to the ultimate demise of slavery and ultimately the demise of Jim Crow.

So how flawed can this document be?

Your mention of “original” sin, simply is reflective of the view of the left, of your church, of your pastor that America is fundamentally flawed. It was built upon sin, and everything America has done since, has been tarnished. Just like the Reverend Wright, your view is that our political institutions are institutionally corrupted by racism.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

You don’t get it. It was the Declaration, it was the Constitution, it was the ideas and the ideal that undermined slavery and institutional racism. But if you are brought up to believe and attend a church that believes, and befriend a preacher who screams from the pulpit that America’s political institutions are inherently evil, I guess you could say such a thing.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

Notice how Senator Obama can’t bring himself to express his “unyielding” faith in the republican institutions of this country. Is that due to 20 years of attending a church that preached hate towards everything American, that, in its mission statement is more concerned with things African, than things America.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Notice how Obama’s world view is based on race? Once again, are we surprised, considering that he attended a church that views politics through a racial prism. On the left, group identity trumps individualism.

On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy.

You attended a church that preached hatred for America’s republican institutions for 20 years, but now you feel it time to condemn those opinions?

For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views?

Didn’t you, the other day, say you never heard him say such things, publicly or privately? How can you say you heard his anti-American speech one day and the day before say you never heard him say such things (link to Obama‘s previous denial). Good thing your name isn’t Pinocchio.

Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

Nope. Never hear my priest scream “God damn America” or call it “U.S. of KKKA” or say that it started the AIDS virus to wipe out black people, or that America deserved to be attacked on 9/11. Nope, nada, didn’t happen. Such things are unacceptable to me.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, 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 – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Here comes the bait and switch. First, he throws someone who he called a friend and mentor, under the bus for political expediency. But wait, “we’ve” got bigger problems, like global warming….

Never mind that fact that I attended a church the preaches black liberation theology.  Never mind the fact that “I” agreed with Rev. Wright’s anti-American, caucasoidophobic rants for 20 years. Never mind that I exposed my family to weekly sermons that undermined the support of those in attendance to the political institutions of the United States. Never mind that I wrote about “rich, greedy white people” in my autobiography, which I said was inspired by the Reverend Wright.

Never mind the fact that these anti-American, anti-Israeli, causcasoidophobic thoughts are part of who I am and will influence how I govern, we’ve got bigger problems like global warming to worry about.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Here it comes, the left’s favorite pastime, moral equivalence. I knew he couldn’t leave this church. It is who he is.

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, 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 bias that make up the black experience in America.

That’s sad. There is no excuse for hating America. There is no excuse for telling your congregation that the government created AIDS to kill you….

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can 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 by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

He throws grandma under the bus, wow! Moral equivalence must be some powerful drug! Senator Obama, I’ve cut ties with people, friends, who have done much less than preach hatred of their own country. You can’t disown him, because he is indeed you. You are comfortable with his message. It fits with your leftist views. Oh, and if grandma is alive, she ought to slap you and cut you out of her will.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

And this makes you like every other leftist race hustler. You are fixated on one part of American history. Like it is the only, the most important thing that ever happened in America. You may find this shocking, but most white Americans don’t care about it anymore. And that’s a good thing. White America is over it. You cling to the past, while the rest of America wants to move on and is moving on. Slavery is dead and buried, Jim Crow is dead and buried. Faulkner’s problem, like yours, is that you are confined and defined by the past. Let it go.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

The same old same old. “Were”, “where”, “did” are the operative words. And Mr. Obama, spending per student isn’t indicative of student performance. For instance, look at the high dollar amounts spent in Cincinnati and Kansas City on the public school systems.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

So this excuses the black liberation theology which hates America? You sound more like Jesse Jackson.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

Even if I acknowledge this as true, why would I want someone who hates America as my President?

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. 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.

Like a real leftist, you justify every action. Moral equivalence creeps in to every aspect of your life. On the other hand, I can without hesitation, condemn such anti-Americanism. There is no excuse. Wright’s (and yours) denunciation of America’s free institutions does great harm to America’s black population, it undermines their faith in their country and their hope for the future. Tthat in not condemning it, you yourself, harm the African-American community in the long run.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.

To the left, everyone is a victim, because remember, America’s founding was built on sin.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons 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. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

So you apparently agreed enough with Rev. Wright to sit in the pews for 20 years and make him your mentor and friend. But now you disagree? Which Obama do I buy into? The one who associated with a vocal anti-American or the one who now says that “oh, now that all this is public, I really didn’t agree with him at all and if you listened to me yesterday, I never even heard him say that.” Which Obama do I believe?

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds.

Once upon a time, Mr. Obama, there were signs that read, “Irishmen and Dogs need not apply.” Catholics were discriminated against…. The past is the past. You can either allow the past to keep you in chains, chains like those who say “rich white people” keep you down….

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

You just refused to disassociate yourself with a man who preaches hate towards whites, who preaches hate towards Jews, who preaches hate towards his own country, and who preaches lies via crazy conspiracy theories. You attended this church for 20 years without hesitation. Only when your church’s virulent anti-Americanism is exposed do you mildly condemn it.

It should be repeated, because it is a reflection of what you truly believe. If you felt it so heinous, you would have found another church.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction.

Exposing hatred for a great country, exposing causcasoidophobia, exposing outright lies, is a distraction? Finding that a presidential candidate agrees for 20 years with such far left, anti-American preaching isn’t a distraction, it is something fundamental as it predicts how that person will act in office.

This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem.

Whoops, back to the evil, bad, sinful America mode.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

How many of these people decided to buy cable tv? A flatscreen tv? Instead, for what they pay a month in cable bills, or cell phone bills, they could have bought their family health insurance. Once again, like his church preaches, “I’m” to blame.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

Just like your church preaches, evil America, imperial power, terrorizing the world.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Yes, those poor innocent illegal aliens cause no harm at all. Just a scapegoat created by the white establishment…. I see more of the Reverend Wright the further I go….

Thank God, it is over!

So, in my previous post, I made a few predictions, let’s look at the results:

• He will not disassociate himself with his church that is based on black liberation theology.— Called that one.

• He will not disassociate himself from the Reverend Wright. How could Obama do that to someone he agrees with?—Right on that one.

• Somehow, someway, he will include in this speech, that at its core, America is an evil, bad, or corrupted in some way, shape or form.— Hit the nail on the head.

• He will excuse the behavior his pastor and church, because of the harm done to the black community by the Rev. Wrights all-controlling white people.—I’m clairvoyant.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rosemary’s Thoughts, A Newt One- Chris Hill on tonight, Adam’s Blog, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, third world county, McCain Blogs, DragonLady’s World, The World According to Carl, Miss Beth’s Victory Dance, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Right Voices, Gone Hollywood, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Tags: Obama, Philadelphia, race speech