Here is the Transcript
In listened to the speech in its entirety yesterday. The man is a very good speaker, that much is known. I will go as far as to say that he is the best speaker of my time.
With that said, lets disect the transcript:
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.
When he talks of not being able to disown Wright no more than he could disown the black community he hints at what many are talking about. The section of the Black population that has the woe is me and the white man controls all mentality. There are still segments of that population in mass. Sadly as Obama also stated there are still those whites that have a racial bias as well. That all blacks are bad etc etc.
But he does a good transition to show that its still an issue to some.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork.
You have to admit that its pretty funny hearing Obama talk about “hoping” something will go away, when his whole campaign was about “hope” for change.
OK, NOW he loses me even more.
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.
What is he talking about? Sure sounds like some woe is me BS. Especially coming from a man that went to some top notch schools over the last 40 years! Segregation in schools is not an issue following BvsB. What makes schools predominant of any specific race is the surrounding neighborhoods racial makeup. Its not a systemic federal creation of such a makeup, but the willingness of people to create a safe area for themselves as well as others. There are areas of examples of this throughout the US, pick your local area and think of the racial makeup of it and how it got that way.
The thing for me is, that the Wright snippets that I saw were not so much a race thing, it was more of a HATE thing. I didn’t care for the racial tone of this sermon, but it was more that it was HATE filled. It was brewing in hate, and to ME, unless you agree with the taste of the brew you don’t continue to sit there and eat it. Let alone sip on it for 20 years. Oprah saw that hatred and made a speedy exit. She distanced herself from such rhetoric because she probably did not agree with his views. You can’t continue to sit in a sermon without believing in the message. Its like a bad movie, you eventually walk out.
Those of you that are in awe over the speech fell into the perfectly laid trap. Obama is a great orator, you cannot take that from him, but in his effort to stamp out the racial issue he touched heavily on his own views but people seemingly glared over them, all too willingly. Solely based on the fact that the man has a great speaking tone.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
He touches on a few things here that strike me.
First he touches on the worsening of the cycle through welfare. Which leads me to ask, are you going to cut welfare further? If so, state so. I doubt he will.
Second, the talk of lack of basic services in todays society is a cop out.
Living in the hood myself I saw no lack of basic services. What I saw were many people destroying their neighborhood park, and using it as a drug haven. The blight is created by the people that live in an area, the neglect is done by those that don’t give a damn about their building because they do not own it, it doesn’t come from some federal regulation. And it sure as hell doesn’t stem from some “white man” control.
No man controls me.
I now live in suburbia, and blighted it is not, people take care of their neighborhood and their homes.
Lawns may grow a bit long from laziness or being tired from the daily work grind but people aren’t letting their homes rot away because they own that home, they want to keep that neighborhood clean and safe. That is what is lacking from urban areas. That sense of pride and ownership in your own community. Among other things of course.
A friend of mine said the following:
He claims the greed of the WHITE man is responsible for all of the ills of black society, giving de facto absolution to those who contribute to the stereotypical image of black America – absent fathers, irresponsible mothers, the street culture . . . Poverty and hopelessness are the result of these factors, not the cause. Treating poverty with great gouts of money is not going to solve anything without a stable family unit and shared responsibility at its core.
Certainly there were terrible abuses in the past, but if they cannot be left in the past, how can African-Americans, or any of us move on? Rage is a poor substitute for self-confidence and success. Demands for reparations will fire up a mob, but they are ultimately divisive. Slavery ended 150 years ago, Jim Crow struggled on for another hundred years, but even it was broken with the Brown decision. It’s been a long road, and we’re not all the way to where we would like to be yet, but we have made amazing progress.
Perfectly stated indeed!
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.
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. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
From everything I read there, I see no difference between the way he and Wright think. Obama is just more crafty in his wording.
It proves to me that he agrees with his pastor on many issues, and I suspect has talked at length about them.
Michelle Malkin has touched on quote a few areas in both the Jena case and in the illegal immigrant debate where its pretty clear that one side of the argument gets the positive spin from the news media.
A man like Pastor Wright, doesn’t seem like the type that changes his rhetoric from the pulpit to the dinner table. The fear that many of Obama supporters have is that he may have these hateful speeches in his own thinking. Its hard to separate a man with 20 years of personal influence from you.
Oddly enough he points to this:
And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
Which confuses me since his entire campaign is based on the movement towards government doing more for you and controlling more for you. Here he talks of self reliance, but he hasn’t noted anything about self responsibility from any of his previous positions. For that matter self defense in your own home is even subject to federal regulation according to Obama.
Seems like a nice play on words to capture people from the center just a bit. Those that wont do the due diligence to fact check his words from his stated positions and votes.
What also gets me is that Obama in this speech talked about how he found and has stood there for many hateful things that his Pastor has said, yet if its so hateful, where were your kids, that are seemingly being indoctrinated with this thought. Do you leave them at home on Sunday Morning? Or does he have to go back home and reexplain the hateful positions of his pastor to his children?
One of my favorite parts of the speech are as follows:
The profound mistake of Rev. 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 the 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.
At least he acknowledges that things have gotten better. Not perfect but better.
Obama can claim to be above the political fray, but he doesn’t pass the closer observation test at all.
I have no doubt that many that are already hardcore supporters of Barack will continue to support Barack, after all his positions don’t sway to far from the left as expect. That after all is his base. The ones that truly are open thinkers, that do their own side research may see that Obama isn’t that much different that your run of the mil left wing liberal with some extreme socialistic views.
