Defending Chicago Pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright
Road Kill on Obama's way to the White House?
By Bakari Kitwana
When Senator Barack Obama denounced Minister Louis Farrakhan, I thought it was knee-jerk reaction—wrong-headed, but made in the heat of battle.
When he declined Tavis Smiley’s invitation to February's annual State of the Black Union, even when Hillary Clinton’s attendance made him painfully absent, I thought that too could be likened to a small misstep.
But Obama’s decision last Friday to condemn Dr. Jeremiah Wright who, over the course of a 20-year mentorship, married the Obama's and baptized their children, was not sloppy thinking. It's calculated strategy.
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(h.t. to Erin Kotecki-Vest, at BlogHer
(By the way, Malkin says she grew up in South Jersey, has spent time in black churches, and thinks most black people would be insulted by the talk about how we have a different way of thinking and speaking about race.
From Jackie Jones' roundup piece on the speech and reactions to it. It quotes me as well, but I found this most interesting:
“When the history of this campaign is written, it will be recorded that this was the seminal moment, the moment when (Obama) seized adversity and controversy and proved even more eloquently that he must be president,” GOP analyst Joe Watkins told MSNBC.
Attytood blogs:
There will surely be those -- and in a nation of more than 300 million people, "those" is numbered in the many millions -- who are so deeply hurt by the harsh and sometime thoughtless (not to mention plain wrong) words of Jeremiah Wright that they will be unable to get past them, even in the wake of hearing what Obama himself has to say. And a few of them will be people who otherwise might have voted for Obama -- but I think in the end Obama solidified his support among the milllions more who are receptive to him -- and to a candid discussion of race.
NPR's news blog quoted this from Andrew Sullivan's column:
"Not that I have changed my mind about the things I wrote in "The Conservative Soul." Not that I have stopped believing in limited government, individual freedom, personal responsibility, pragmatic change. But I have come to believe that large swathes of today's conservative movement truly are hateful ..."
1 comments:
I just finished reading a slew of editorials and am sitting here flabbergasted.
I thought i was hearing a truly transitional moment in politics, but -- to tell the truth -- there have been so many transitional moments that I have lost count.
Now it seems clear: No single speech I can recall has ever been received like this. Observers from all across the spectrum see it as one of the first honest speeches about race that they have ever heard.
The wall between private comments (where we moan and groan and tell jokes and reveal our residual racism) and public behavior where we all act like paragons of tolerance, seems like it might start to crack.
I have always thought that was OUR Berlin wall. Let's tear that sucker down.
Steve
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