Letters to the Editor
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To TRenee re Wright's bias
I don't believe I suggested that Wright and the KKK are equals. My point is that any white candidate that had any association with a white racist group would be dead in the water. Wright's long-term positions are certainly racist. If the exact same comments had been made, but change the noun "white" to "black" the same result would be had.
The majority of Americans have agreed to a very costly and long-term aid program, from affirmative action, to education, to welfare. I think it is time for the black community to find partnership with the white community in solving problems. But the major emphasis will have to come from the blacks themselves. No one can make you successful. You have to exert the maximum effort. All I can do is fight for a level playing field.
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Fatttexassbroad
I guess in your trailer park racial and racist are the same. Folks who went to school past the eighth grade and paid attention have opportunities to learn, for example, that black anger has valid antecedents, and damnation from the pulpit goes thousands of years before the time of Christ. If you want to drink heavily and simplify everything to a biker bar argument, have at it. Just don't pretend to be a Democrat, or at least a post-1965 Democrat. A dixiecrat is what you are ( a superstar but she didn't get far). The midnight train to stupid town, and you're on the caboose. Shawnie boy is the conductor. All abort the dumbass express.
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Here's one for Shawn & Walker
Here's today's quote from familial frontman Bill Clinton:
"You know, I don't give a rip about all this name calling that's going on..."
Go get tell it on the mountain Bill the Ripper!
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Rev. Wright is indeed the problem.
Setting up a premise that we as Americans are "surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people..." and then writing on the basis of this false premise is a self massage.
What guilt does a white Russian who came to America is 1934 or a Swedish immigrant in 1956 bear towards Black America. The fact is that no white American bears this guilt based on their skin color. To ignore this is monumental ignorance. This reveals the bankrupt philosophy of Rev. Wright.
In fact, people like Rev. Wright are the problem in the same way that the Ku Klux Klan is a problem. Namely, they represent "philosophies" that contain the rhetoric of deluded children.
I am not "horrified" in the manner that Mr. Kamiya suggests but am in fact disturbed that more people are not calling this man out for the racial bigot that he is.
The Ku Klux Klan boasts of the imagined wrongs done to them in the exact same way Rev. Wright does. The hypocrisy is astounding. Wright has more in common with Hitler than with Jesus Christ. Like Ward Churchill and Susan Sontag, their self loathing for American culture is at the heart of their rhetoric and their childish excuse for "intellectualism" is pitiful to behold.
As a photographer I read Sontag's "On Photography" with horror in the 1970's. You could get more insight about photography in the episode of "The Flintstones" where Fred tried to be a photographer than any of Sontag's imbuing the obvious with the profound.
What is truly profound is Wright's denouncement of an entire people by skin color while at the same time accusing that very race of doing the same thing. Hypocrisy on such a public level and the idea of having a President who looks up to such a man is what is horrifying.
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Mr. May
You may care to read the entire text of Wright's sermon, all words in context, and then you may care to eat your own words about their content.
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Jeremiah Wright is exactly the problem! He is a black Dick Cheney, a hate-mongering villian.
If this man Wright were white, red, black, yellow, pink or whatever, I still would have had the same visceral reaction to his arrogant hatred and pus spewing narrative! I have never heard such filth! I have never been so saddened.
I know many races who have been equally wronged who do not spew this kind of garbage!
I am Polish, and Hitler killed millions of Poles! I also have many Native American friends and they do not have this ugliness erupting from their mouths!
I am not buying into that this form of verbal sickness is all right! It is all wrong!
Both of my deceased parents were in the military in World War two, and both of them were wounded. My father cried to his dying day over that war and the misery he witnessed!
I will not have you degrade any of our American people over patriotism for our country!
Even though in our family's personal history there were many people killed by Nazi's, and the Russians, I do not go around spewing hatred for the German or the Russian people. It would never enter my mind! I just think that the human race has made many mistakes. I do know if I were in this man's church I would leave after one visit and never return, and I would take a long, hot shower.
People are trying to sell this malarky as the right wingers reacting on the grounds of some misplaced patriotism. That is all wrong! I opposed the war as do my children. We are not rascists. We are Democrats and we are liberal. I simply have to say that Obama as a man is diminshed in my eyes because he did not walk out of this vituperative hate-mongering faux minister of Jesus love. He engenders hatred. I think that is wrong. It has NOTHING to do with patriotism! My family knows patriotism and the price heros pay. We do not take it lightly. You should be ashamed of this article.
geeegee
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T.Renee's Aeschylus, I Know This is Coming Late in the Game...
"...Listen, I have faith in the government, too, Aeschylus, but the U.S. government has a history of medically experimenting on people of color. Did you know that as recently as the 1970s, poor black women, Latinas and Native American women were forcibly sterilized, sometimes without their knowledge, by Public Aid offices? Sometimes children as young as 10? And all of this happened, not to mention the syphilis experiments, throughout Wright’s lifetime...."
This may be just so much wasted effort. I believe it was de Toqueville who stated, if memory serves me, that Americans were "blessed" with little propensity for memory and an almost inherent predisposition to always look ahead. Marry that up with the blind patriotism that many Americans almost reflexively exhibit and you've got a situation where attempting to get Americans, esp Americans of European descent, to see why some other Americans don't necessarily swallow the pap of much of our history is akin to laying the mechanics of flight before a pig and expecting the lesson to stick. Odds on, it's just not gonna happen.
Obama was initially tolerated by many lower, middle and working class whites because his candidacy seemingly avoided the necessity of having to confront the wormier aspects of American history and social interaction. That allowed some of this demographic to vote for him in greater numbers than they'd normally vote for a black candidate. A multi-racial, well educated and "clean, articulate [in the memorable words of Joe Biden]" coloured man could allay some of the visceral reactions many whites would normally have for a "black" candidate. He was truly a "magic negro"--a term right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh conjured up more out of the frustration that one couldn't treat [dismiss] him as the typical "black politician" than for any other motive--in that you could project whatever benign fantasy onto his "blank slate [as Obama has memorably put it]. The candidate's relative racial naivete also played into his initial racial teflon. On another blog, I brought up the fact that, unlike previous black candidates for national office and blacks like his wife, Obama's racial outlook and transcendant attitude was influenced by the "good fortune" of having been the issue of parents whose lineage could not be traced to the "butt end" of slavery. His parents were white and continental African and were not descended from New World slaves of African descent [if his father's lineage had been involved in N. American slavery at all it would have been to facilitate that trade--and the transportation of its human subjects--from the African interior to the West Coast of the continent, where European slavers, bound for the New World, on-loaded their human cargo] . While not having been bound by the race memory of slavery, Obama was left with an almost guileless vulnerability to the perils he'd be confronting should he seek the Presidency; perils which Michelle--as evinced by her initial reluctance to certify her husband's seemingly quixotic quest--probably understood all too well.
The fact that he'd gotten as far as he did without the inevitable backlash against his candidacy is a wonder and a testament to his inherent skills and apparently optimistic view of America and its people. But, of course, the Clinton campaign and Ohio gave his candidacy a reality check.
Even before there was even a hint of a Jeremiah Wright, working, lower and middle class and older whites began giving evidence that they weren't seeing Obama as an individual but as another "black candidate." When many of those whites saw in a 91pct black vote out of Mississippi a "biased" black vote, rather than the inevitable reaction to a slyly insulting and condescending racial campaign by the Clintons, you just knew it was the beginning of the end of any racial comity, however illusory that comity may have been, in the Primaries. Wright was just the icing on the cake. Since many whites have neither the inclination nor wherewithal to delve into the seamier aspects of American history, Wright was a shrieking wake-up call that they were now confronted with the uncomfortable realisation that Obama was closer to the Presidency than any black before him. That this white reaction to Wright, a man who's made some intemperate--and, to be sure, offensive--statements (but hardly on the order of the long-running lunatic ravings of a Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, John Hagee or a Rod Parsley--a line-up of mugs no white candidate for President has ever been made to answer for until, just recently, McCain) almost sunk Obama's candidacy ("awww, hell, here's another 'black candidate' reminding us of our nation's sins"--even though Obama had done an admirable job of keeping race out of the political picture), given the willful lack of historical context on the part of those voters, should not have been surprising to the Obama campaign. The fact that it was and that it appeared to knock Obama even momentarily off stride is not only evidence of much of Middle America's historical amnesia but further evidence of Obama's racial artlessness (which, may have been why black political and social/business figures like Charley Rangel and Bob Johnson, early on and, to be sure, at the behest of the Clintons, belittled his candidacy).
Obama appears to be a quick study; he had better be if he hopes to preserve his bid for the Presidency, given the realities of this country's political and social landscape. One of the ways he can do that is to realise the nature of the American polity (and, especially as to how it regards a particular subject*) he's seeking to persuade and the consequences of seeking to persuade it.
*e.g., given the capriciousness of race, had the two murders, by black street thugs, of two white North Carolina coeds occurred closer to the N. Carolia primary, Obama could kiss that baby goodbye.