Word: jeremiah
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...more disown [the Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother," Barack Obama said in the most powerful sentence of his extraordinary speech about race on March 18 in Philadelphia, "a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me ... 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...
...that is the breathtakingly unconventional speech Obama gave today. Rather than disown his former pastor and spiritual adviser, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., as well as denounce Wright's controversial sermons, Obama declared that he could denounce but not disown. "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," he said. He castigated Wright, but did not cast him off. Obama refused to add his voice to the chorus vilifying Wright. Acknowledging how disingenuous that would have been, and how craven, Obama instead pulled Wright back and re-owned him, saying, "As imperfect...
Obama did what politicians so rarely do - acknowledge complexity, insist that the issue currently roiling the presidential campaign - the story of Jeremiah Wright's words - is not a story that is clear-cut between right and wrong, or between black and white for that matter. Having waged a campaign, with great success, on the notion that race as a political and electoral issue could be transcended, with a strategy that assiduously downplayed race, Obama declared today that the only way to transcend race is to focus on it rather than downplay it - to acknowledge its sometimes oppressive presence in American...
...Here's somebody with an extraordinary amount of credibility on this topic from who he is genetically, to how he was raised to who he is politically. At the same time placing in context who Jeremiah Wright is. This speech is not out of the political playbook. A bunch of consultants did not dream this up. He denounced Wright but stood by him and compared him to his grandmother, that is politically risky. Especially on both sides...
...hear African Americans who were upset that he even denounced Jeremiah Wright's words. And there'll be people on the right that think that standing by his mentor is the wrong thing to do. There's a lot of African Americans who feel that it was gratuitous - talking about the pain or blame that white Americans feel over pressure for jobs. But that too is the message that will help in Pennsylvania and beyond. That he can express to white Americans what makes them uneasy, that it's the competition and that blacks and whites can sit and point...