redblueamerica.com

The pastor issue is put to rest. We know hate as opposed to racism, and it was pure hate for America.

My problem here is not Barack. However, he ought to have gathered his children and spouse and exited quietly from Trinity Church, if that is what is being spewed from the pulpit.

My problem for Barack is if he did not have the backbone to do this, to just make it clear to Wright that he did not agree, nor approve, of his statements and could not be a member of a church whose message was such as this, then how much back bone will he display in our very complicated international affairs.
?

The speech itself was wonderful. He is a very good orator. It remains to be seen how he will wear, and just how much determination and leadership he actually does posses. My sympathy or empathy was with him, and I understand not publicly chasitsing his long time friend, and also understand that he can hate the sin, while loving the sinner. But, he must, absolutely must, be clear about this hate thing.

In addition, I would add..white people are not the only ones who are caught in a time warp. It is time for black people to see the change that is being brought about, and be a part of this, instead of wallowing in yesterdays bad news. Not many people are living today who actually did these terrible things..so it is time to let it be a part of the sullied past, and bring on the glorious future!

Jim, let me preface this by saying that I respect and have fondness for you. But that I'm going to heartily disagree with you here.

* I admit to being somewhat mystified by conservative attitudes on race. There seems to be a belief that "there's no more Jim Crow, so there's no more problems rooted in 300 years of official racism in this country." It's not just that conservatives don't think government should be solving the problem; it seems that they really don't think there is any problem of any sort.

* Or, if they acknowledge there are problems affecting the African American community, conservatives suggest they're entirely self-inflicted. Bill Cosby's critique has some merit -- indeed, Barack Obama echoed it in today's speech, and has done so before. This isn't an either-or proposition, though, and it'd be nice to see conservatives acknowledge that 300 years of racism might've molded an imperfect modern society. (And, oh hell, let me give George W. Bush credit on this score for the second time today. But I think he's the exception to the rule.)

* The problem, then, is that the people who do want to discuss racism's lingering effects -- and what to do about it -- get lumped into a giant and supposedly disreputable "race panderer" category. We could just get past racism, the thought seems to go, if only we'd stop talking about it. This is utter bunk. But it's how Obama's speech today -- which was sober, thoughtful and informed -- gets transformed into (as one commentator called it) a "hustle." Obama himself gets transformed into a less-threatening version of Al Sharpton. Which only makes sense if one is incapable of distinguishing, well, anything at all.

* If the beliefs of African American churches are noxious, the willful ignorance of some whites and conservatives regarding how the parishoners came to those attitudes is, frankly equally noxious. Anger and paranoia about race did not spring up in a vacuum: Again: 300 years of official racism. I don't have any relatives who were the subject of syphillis experiments; my father and grandfather didn't have to face the prospect of lynching; my mother wasn't denied the right to vote on account of race, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, many of our black brothers and sisters cannot say the same thing.

Again: If for 300 years bad things happened to your people in this country because of their race, it probably wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that new bad things that happen to you and your people might also be because of race. These are relatively fresh wounds. And to pretend otherwise is, I think, somewhat delusional.

None of this means that I think God should damn America, by the way. But conservatives can only have their shock and anger over Jeremiah Wright if they pretend that the society we have is the society that has always existed, and that history -- our history -- didn't really happen.

"Do you believe that Barack Obama believes that God should damn America? You said the other day that you don't know. What do you think now?"

I don't think he believes that. But I believe his thinking is tinged by Wright's political theology. How could it not be? Obama has been a parishioner for two decades.

As I discuss on my post, Obama wants to have it both ways. He wants to reject Wright's headline-grabbing statements but hold fast to his teachings and his works. The point is, you can't separate the two. The political theology informs the teachings and works.

There's a lot to go over here, Joel. It will take days. But some quick thoughts on your take:

I think Obama today made a persuasive case that, yes, anger about America is widespread in the black community -- but that he has transcended the anger to seek out a better future for blacks, whites and everybody else in the American community.

One of the good things to come of this Wright controversy is how it has opened the doors of a certain noxious brand of the African-American religious experience to the nation as a whole. Some of the most disturbing aspects of those clips are the reaction of the audience -- many of them young people who, unlike Wright, did not experience the pain of Jim Crow (Obama's catch-all excuse for his spiritual mentor). Yet there they are, whooping it up as the Man of God accentuates his statement that Clinton was "ridin' dirty" with Monica by grinding his hips on the pulpit and yelling "Amen" when Wright says America had it coming just days after the 9/11 attacks.

The trouble is, I haven't seen Obama do anything substantial to "transcend" that anger. He certainly didn't do it in this speech. I see him as excusing it.

The thing is: There are very few African Americans in public life who haven't been exposed to that anger ("in the barber shops and beauty shops") as long or longer than Obama.

Actually, one African American who has been exposed to that anger longer than Obama is Bill Cosby. And when Cosby tries to address serious issues in the black community without pandering, but by speaking hard truths, he is villified for it, most viciously by blacks.

A better Obama speech would have challeneged the victim culture that his church peddles. But we didn't get that, and I don't think we ever will. Obama may have "largely avoided pandering or demagoguery on the issue of race," though I think that notion is debatable. Yet it is without doubt that his church and pastor have pandered and demagogued -- and denouncing it and excusing it at the same time is, well, kinda lame.

I enjoyed his speech, but by making race a crux of his campaign he fell right into the black/white dichotomy his enemies wanted him to fall into. He is going to lose a lot of states really bad after this and he is going to lose the nomination. He ran as the change candidate...now he is becoming the "black" candidate. This will not help him.

This was the best and most-thoughtful speech on the subject of race given during my lifetime, I believe. I'm open to other nominations.