From what I gathered, he hates rich white people...so unless you're rich, he probably doesn't hate you, even if you're white. I'd go so far as to say that he would probably thank you for the assistance that you've given to your community.

Also...my father is a little racist. A few of my really good friends are a little racist. These are important people to me, who you could say would probably help define my personality...

I am not racist in any way. Is it really that much of a contradiction that two people with different beliefs could still have a valuable friendship?

I'm a white, native Texan, evangelical Christian and former Marine who doesn't understand what the media are talking about. Rev. Wright is an American who actually served in the military, unlike the yellow-bellied chicken vultures in the White House and Bush administration. Jeremiah Wright is a preacher. It is not his duty to excuse the misadventures and misbehavior of this or any other nation. His duty, his vocation, is to point out the sore spots and call this nation to repentance. That's what he is doing and he is doing it superbly. As I have written on my blog, www.robert-flynn.net the best known Christian of the twentieth century was Adolf Hitler. We should all pray that George Bush is not the best known Christian of the twenty-first century. Republicans talk about religion, Democrats do religion. Maybe Jesus wasn't kidding when he said, love your enemies. Or, that his followers were those who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and sought justice for those in jail.

Tina,Rose,TXGirl, MCE, et al , can you please give a quote(& the whole quote) or two that bothers you, so I know wtf you are criticizing? Unmask911 seems to be the only one of thre most recent commenters that took the time to read/isten to Wright . I keep asking, here & there, and nobody's got anything; just a vague reiteration of what the MSM blatherers( who seem unaware also) have put out .

Your post wasn't up yet , when I started mine.;)

Major story, objective and well-done.

Gerry, I heard the entire NAACP speech. He was talking about AFRICAN vs. EUROPEAN CULTURE, not biology, not race. Wright is not one of those who use the term African-American exclusively for black. He says "black" and "white" frequently, and when he means race, he says "black" and "white" and he very pointedly used the term African and European, not black and white. There is nothing in that speech that says a damn thing about biological differences between the races. The entire discourse was about culture, from music to preaching styles to religious perspectives being different when you're in the hold of the ship and when you're on deck. And I don't care how many ignorant blowhards in the media or on comment boards continue to spout it (and I don't mean you; I've seen this crap repeated over and over with the same vehement righteousness that they have it correct that I hear from people who say Bill Clinton closed a runway down at LAX, that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, that Obama is a Muslim and that Hillary killed Vince Foster). That doesn't make it any more correct.

Wright quoted a children's education scholar, Janice Hale -- one of whose books, Unbank the Fire: Visions for the Education of African=American Children, by the way, was a Pulitzer nominee -- and her theories. Here's the blurb on the Pulitzer-nominated book talking about her earlier work, the one cited by Wright, from its publisher, that bastion of underground radical racist literature, Johns Hopkins University Press:

From the Publisher

In her highly acclaimed work Black Children, Janice Hale argued that the difficulties many African American children have in school result from differences in learning style that are deeply rooted in African American culture.

Culture, not race, not brains wired differently, not biology. Good lord, is this stuff that difficult to track down??? Did even ONE of these idiot pundits bother to look up, let alone actually read the books by any of the people Wright cited before they shot off their mouths on the subject??

At least some people did weigh in on the books he cited for his AIDS created by the government theory (and concluded there wasn't much to it) -- which is the only truly wacko thing he said. Geez, Louise, we're all entitled to hold one or two ridiculous ideas in our lifetimes. It shouldn't negate an entire lifetime of thought and action. Do Reagan worshippers denounce and reject St. Ronnie because he and Nancy believed in astrology? (Personally, I find supply-side economics quite a bit more ridiculous and fairy-tale divorced from reality nonsense than astrology, but that's just me.)

This country has a really serious problem of dealing with anything in a grown-up, nuanced manner. We don't do complex. We can't discuss any topic more complicated than who won the ball game and who is Britney sleeping with now. The French, God love 'em because nobody else will, will have running debates for months in a general circulation newspaper or magazine about some obscure philosophical theory. But we can't even discuss practical, concrete issues of life and death with any more depth than a kids' wading pool.

Now, whether any of Hale's work is definitive, I don't know, I'm not a scholar in the field. But the author of the theories Wright cites is certainly a respectable scholar, not some crackpot with a degree from a mail-order catalog.

You know, in some ways, I wouldn't mind if the Rev. Wright issue was a key focus of attention in the media, IF -- and it's a big IF and would only exist in some alternate universe where political discourse is sane and intelligent -- he was quoted accurately, the issues he touched on were actually discussed, the context in which they were said was accurately explored, people who knew what the hell they were talking about were asked their opinion instead of just any old Joe Pundit off the pundit turnip truck, if a full picture of the man and not just the YouTube version was presented, a fuller discussion was held about the intersection of politics and religion (and some of the wacko stuff the Christian right believes -- that have actually become domestic POLICY or could, heaven forbid, become foreign policy under a Republican administration) -- if anything like that type of conversation was being pursued, it might be worth the bothering. If 24-hour news actually meant we had 23 more hours to explore issues in depth and explore issues beyond the simple subset we address in the evening news. If pigs could fly.

And, you know, Obama is not really a huge question mark. He has a history of public service that goes back a couple of decades, as an organizer, as a lawyer, as a state lawmaker and in the U.S. Senate. Is there ANYTHING in his history that indicates he hates white people, embraces divisive rhetoric, believes that AIDS was government genocide? NO. Then why is this an issue even if one accepts the simplistic caricature of Wright's most outrageous youtube moments? And he'd have been under more pressure in his hometown to be an activist in that mold than he is in a more diverse national arena. Glenn's point under the snark is right. This issue -- as it has played out in the media, in any event -- is a waste of our time.