This one can be called: When Republicans Attack.

We were having a perfectly civil debate until this man took exception to the idea that George Bush might have not responded to Hurricane Katrina well. He then got up and knocked down some of our equipment. Watch it here:




Young Turks interviews at RNC

Let's all take a seventeen-minute time-out today to watch, with our kids, the full version of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which celebrates its 45-year anniversary today. (Here also is the full text.)

Is it any wonder that men and women who lived through this period became so especially overpowered watching Obama accept the nomination.

Who could not be moved at the sight of a major political party naming Barack Obama, an African American, as its presidential candidate? To me, there could not be a better sign that America has left behind its racist past. We are now approaching what may be termed "the end of racism." The End of Racism was the title of my 1995 bestseller, hugely controversial when it was published, but now it seems to have been a decade ahead of its time. If we appreciate the significance of our current moment, we are driven to an ironic but rational conclusion: perhaps the best way to recognize Obama's historic achievement is to vote for John McCain this November.

Consider this: for the past several years we have been hearing liberal Democrats emphasize how racism still defines America, how things haven't really changed all that much, how racism has gone underground and is now more covert and more dangerous than ever. It may seem strange that a racist country would adopt legal policies that discriminate against the majority and in favor of minorities. Even so, liberal activists and civil rights activists continue to browbeat white America in the schools, in the universities, in politics and in the media if there is the slightest dissent from civil rights orthodoxy.

Well, I don't know how many people have been drinking the liberal Kool-Aid, but these people must be utterly shocked at the success of Barack Obama. Here is a guy who could not possibly have made it as far as he has with only black votes. He has attracted not only white votes but the votes of some of the most affluent and successful segments of the white community. Obama, not Hillary, is the pillar of the white establishment. Moreover, Obama's own campaign is based on the premise that America is no longer racist. Far from making race-based appeals, to blacks on the basis of solidarity, and to whites on the basis of guilt, Obama campaigns on the expectation that whites share his economic values and foreign policy positions and view of America. In other words, Obama's public message is that race doesn't matter and that transracial alliances should be built on shared political and cultural values. It's a good message, and how it must dismay professional civil rights activists to hear it. I wouldn't be surprised if Jesse Jackson is telling family members, "If race relations keep improving like this, I may have to get a real job."

Clearly there are many in the liberal Democratic camp who are made profoundly uncomfortable by the recognition that racism is no more a defining feature of American life or even African American life. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that racism does not exist. This is a big country, and surely one can find several examples of it. But racism, which used to be systematic, is now only episodic. In fact, when I ask young blacks on the campus today whether America is racist, many say yes. But if I ask them to give me examples of how that racism affects their lives, they are hard pressed to give a single one. The best they can do is to mention "Rodney King" or provide some well-known, recycled horror story. Recently someone told me that McCain is still winning the white vote by a substantial majority and that shows "we have a long way to go" in overcoming white bigotry. By this logic, blacks are have even longer way to go in overcoming their bigotry since Obama is winning almost 98 percent of the black vote. When your logic leads to an absurd conclusion, go back and re-examine the premise.

Even though Obama's candidacy signals that America is overcoming its racial past, neither Obama nor his wife recognize that. Their personal statements, as seen for example in Obama's books, are suffused with race-consciousness, race-obsession and even racial resentment. The more privileges they have received on the basis of race, the more embittered they seem to become. The source of these pathologies is the very liberalism that the Obamas have embraced: a liberalism that declares them equal while treating them as inferiors who need preferential treatment. (Liberals hate to have this pointed out; hence the irrational invective of the early responses to this post.) The solutions are obvious. If you want to get rid of racial obsession, stop talking and thinking about race so much. If you want to remove race as the basis of decision-making in America, let's eliminate America's policies that make race the basis of decision-making. And if you want a party that stands for color-blindess and equal opportunity, you might consider voting for the Republicans.

It's Kenya's national sport, a kind of national obsession. From a tiny age, young Kenyans dream of the roar of the crowd, the fame and success that comes from demonstrated excellence on the field.

Conventional thinking--and quite a few liberal academics--hold that this cultural obsession is the best explanation for the incredible Olympic success of Kenya's distance runners. Kenya in particular, and East Africa in general, enjoys a near-monopoly in medals in the long distance races.

The only problem--pointed out by John Entine in his fascinating book Taboo--is that the national obsession in Kenya is not running but soccer. Kenyans are crazy about soccer! "Unfortunately," Entine observes, "Kenyans are among the world's worst soccer players." Even in Africa, Kenya is routinely routed by West African countries like Cameroon and Nigeria.

Running is not such a big deal in Kenya. And when it comes to short-distance sprints, Kenyans and other East Africans aren't particularly good. Virtually every running record from the 100 to the 400 meters, male and female, is held by athletes of West African ancestry. It's only in the 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters and in the marathon that the special abilities of East African runners manifest themselves.

Entine, an Emmy winning journalist formerly with NBC News, has done his homework. He does not completely reject economic and cultural explanations of athletic prowess. He just shows their inadequacy. For instance, examing the notion that poverty is responsible for success in sport, Entine notes that most poor countries do terribly in sports. How many runners from poverty-stricken Bangla Desh, for instance, have won Olympic medals in Beijing? The "spur" of poverty is more than trounced by the benefits of superior nutrition, superior facilities and superior coaching in affluent countries.

So what about culture? Yes, culture can help to account for why Americans do well at baseball and why the Chinese usually triumph in ping pong. Americans play baseball more than most others, and no one takes ping pong more seriously than the Chinese. But Entine notes that running is universal. In every country, young people run races. "Given the universality of running," Amby Burfoot writes in Runner's World, "it is reasonable to expect that the best runners should come from a wide range of countries and racial groups." So why are there such enduring and overwhelming racial differences in the outcome?

Entine is not afraid to say that "genetically linked, highly heritable characteristics, such as skeletal structure, muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, and lung capacity are not evenly distributed among populations." These traits help to explain why groups succeed--and sometimes fail--in certain sports. For instance, the same body type that works so well in the boxing ring and on the track doesn't do so well in the water. How many black swimmers have there been on the U.S. Olympic team? Even countries on the African coast have a terrible record when it comes to swimming medals.

Entine's book is titled "Taboo" because he knows how controversial his thesis is, how fiercely it is hated and resisted. I suspect this is not because of powerful academic evidence that Entine is wrong. If there is such evidence, I would like to see it, but so far I've had a hard time finding it. Rather, the resistance is due to the liberal fear that if we praise black athletic superiority and attribute it to genes, this opens the door for racists to speculate about black intellectual inferiority and to attribute it too to genes.

Yet this is a non-sequitur. Groups can be unequal physically and still be equal intellectually. Men and women are clearly unequal in upper-body strength, for instance, and yet the average IQ for males and females is the same, although the bell curve distribution of that IQ is not. But I'll leave that subject for a later blog.

My general point is that many liberals are looking in the wrong place to find a justification for their support for political equality. As Jefferson noted a long time ago, inequality of endowment, whether it exists or not, is no warrant for inequality of rights. Equality is not a factual proposition, derived from biology. It is a moral proposition, derived from Christianity.

I've been watching with patriotic interest the Olympic track and field events. And I notice something about the results that is both remarkable and fascinating. Even so, this something is never commented on by NBC or any of the analysts.

Consider the sprints. The winners seem to be overwhelmingly of African, specifically West African, origin. The man and woman who blew away the field in the 100 meter dash were both from the tiny country of Jamaica . Indeed the contestants in general seem to originally come from the same part of the world. Virtually no one from a different race and region even qualifies. Sure there are Canadian and French and American sprinters, but they too tend to be blacks of West African heritage. These races come down to our West Africans against everyone else's West Africans.

Now consider the long distance races. The winners once again are overwhelmingly black, this time from East Africa . The 10,000 meter race, for instance, came down two guys from Kenya, two guys from Eritrea, and two guys from Ethiopia. Basically it was a contest of six guys from the same neighborhood! If there were a couple of whites and Asians in these races, they seem to have been running strictly to get photos for the family scrapbook.

These results are not a coincidence. They hold true of every Olympics in living memory. In the early 1990s Amby Burfoot, executive editor of Runner's World, published a lead article called "White Men Can't Run." Burfoot documented that blacks have not only dominated Olympic and world championship races for five decades, but also that black hegemony has increased over time. Along the same lines, the Sociology of Sport Journal reports that since the 1930s, "there has been no American white woman who was world class in the 100, 200 or 400 meter dashes. All the outstanding sprinters have been black."

Yet if black domination is a fact, the mysterious question is why. There are three possible explanations, two of which we need to take seriously. The first and most unlikely possibility is that there is widespread discrimination in favor of blacks in sports-not only in running but also in boxing, football, basketball, and so on. Let's call this the liberal explanation. It seems utterly obtuse, but we have to raise this argument because it uses precisely the logic of our civil rights laws.

Our civil rights laws presume that if groups are not equally represented in a given field (say university admissions or jobs or government contracts or sports teams) it follows that invidious discrimination can be inferred on the part of the over-represented groups, directed against the under-represented groups. In this case, of course, is it even reasonable to speculate that blacks are ahead because they are keeping everyone else down? Laugh out loud if you will, but you are laughing at the crazy logic that operates in civil rights jurisprudence in America today.

A second possibility is that there are cultural and motivational differences between groups. For instance, an NBC documentary preceding the 100 meter final noted that Jamaicans simply love to run and they start running competitively at a very young age. Perhaps West Africans simply have a cultural preference for short-distance sprints, and East Africans attach high social priorities to long-distance running. Using the same line of reasoning, sociologist Harry Edwards has suggested that black success in NBA basketball can be explained by the desire of poor African Americans to "jump, jump, jump out of the ghetto." Let's call this the cultural explanation.

The third possibility is that there are natural or genetic differences between the races that explain why one group is so heavily over-represented among both the contestants and the winners. Let's call this the Bell Curve explanation, after the controversial book published several years ago by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Admittedly Murray and Herrnstein were writing about IQ and intellectual performance, not sport. The role of biology in sport is candidly explored in Jon Entine's book Taboo, which I'm reading during the commercial breaks.

Setting aside political correctness, I'm trying to figure out which explanation is right. I don't think we need to be scared to discuss this topic. Before I offer my thoughts, I'd like to know what you think.

Who would have thought that Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg would begin the racial healing in this country? But I think they did start down that path. They had an interesting discussion about race on The View. Watch it here and then let's talk about how we get to a common understanding between black and white folks in this country:




Young Turks on You Tube Young Turks on You Tube Young Turks on You Tube

Now that Barack Obama has pretty much wrapped up the nomination, it's time to raise a question that lots of people have been talking about privately but not publicly. Is it possible that Michelle Obama is the force behind Barack Obama's refusal to embrace traditional patriotic symbols? Could Obama's wife be largely responsible for the candidate's damaging associations with crackpot race-baiters like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Reverend Michael Pfleger? In sum, could Obama's wife be a large part of his political problem?

Obama himself seems, at least on the surface, relatively free of the kind of corrosive racial resentment that is so common among African American activists of our day. This resentment is especially puzzling as it often comes from people who, far from being victims, have actually enjoyed benefits and privileges that they would probably never get if they happened to be white.

Consider the case of Michelle Obama. She was raised in a two-parent, middle-class family. She applied to one of America's top universities, Princeton, and was admitted. Of this experience, Michelle says on the stump, "All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me. Every step of the way, there has been people telling me what I couldn't do. When I applied to Princeton, they said: you can't go there, your test scores aren't high enough."

Which is all very moving, except that her test scores weren't high enough. Michelle Obama is part of the affirmative action generation of above-average but far-from-stellar performers who were granted preferential admission to America's most elite institutions.

Michelle notes that she graduated with honors in her major. Again, the problem is that her undergraduate thesis is on the web. You might expect that she wrote about Shakespeare's sonnets or the political evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois. Well, no. Essentially Michelle Obama wrote about the problems of being a black woman at an Ivy League university.

Here is a typical passage: "By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight."

Alas, the grammar is all wrong here. More than once, the tenses are garbled. People are ignorant "of" the plight of the lower class, not ignorant "to" their plight. And"desparation" should be spelled "desperation." To wreak so much havoc on the English language in one sentence, without conveying anything of substance, is perhaps deserving of a prize. Is this what her professors were thinking when they granted her honors? Whatever the Obamorons say, let's remember that that these are not mere typos; they reflect an estranged relationship to the English language. Moreover they appear not in a daily blog but in a thesis that is supposed to reflect the culmination of one's college career.

Subsequently Michelle went on to further appointments and even managed to cash in big time on her skin color and marriage to Barack Obama. She was hired by the University of Chicago hospitals to run "programs for community relations, neighborhood outrecah, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting." Here her salary was $400,000 a year.

One might expect that the reaction of someone who gets so many privileges to be grateful to a society that makes them possible. But no. Michelle Obama thinks that her very success is an example of white oppression. By a bizarre twist of logic, she converts "you're not good enough, but we'll take you anyway" into a message of "they said I wasn't good enough, but I proved them wrong."

Ordinarily these psychological peculiarities may be of little interest, except perhaps to a therapist. But Michelle now stands next to a man that may be elected president of the United States. Barack Obama wants everyone to "lay off" his wife. He doesn't seem to realize that this is not a reasonable request concerning a woman who clearly influences him and who stands to have public influence in her own right. Moreover, for months the media has been laying off her precisely because she is his wife. Like Michelle, Obama seems to confuse preferential treatment with ill treatment.

Of course we've had controversial first ladies in the White House before. The Obamas, however, aren't there yet. Will Barack Obama be ultimately forced to distance himself not just from the Reverend Wright and the Reverend Pfleger but also from his own wife?

Barack Obama keeps referring to himself as a black man. Indeed he goes out of his way to stress that he is "African American." His parents as well as his friends all called him "Barry" when he was growing up, but Obama insisted on being called by his African given name: Barack. For two decades now he has attended a church which describes itself as authentically"black" and unashamedly "African." If this seems strange when you consider the fact that Obama has one black parent and one white parent, it is.

Obama's racial self-definition is derived from the famous, or infamous, one-drop rule which continues to hold sway in America but nowhere else. In other countries, say the nations of South America or Africa, if you have mixed blood you are considered mixed-race. It would be absurd to call a person who is 50 or even 70 percent white a "black" person. Why then does the United States use this weird rule according to which a single drop (or any visible presence) of blackness makes you automatically "black" and "African American"?

Many people think that the one-drop rule is a product of slavery. Not true. During slavery, the general rule was that slave status passed through the mother. In other words, if a white slave master had sexual relations with a female black slave, the offspring would automatically be considered a slave. By contrast, in the relatively rare case that a black slave produced a child with a free white woman, the offspring would be legally counted as white and therefore free. Obama has a white mother and a black father: in the antebellum South his racial status would pass through his mother.

The one-drop rule was a product of segregation and Jim Crow, not slavery. It developed in the postbellum South as a way to enforce a strict line of demarcation between black and white. Without such a rule an intermediate class of mixed-race mulattoes would make segregation increasingly difficult to enforce. Consequently the Southern ruling class mandated that even a modest trace of African heritage was sufficient to count as "black."

Strangely the one-drop rule has outlived segregation and is today embraced by the very groups the rule was designed to subjugate. Today the NAACP and the Black Caucus live by the one-drop rule, defining as "black" and "African American" anyone who has any discernible evidence of black ancestry. Reading Obama's The Audacity of Hope and his recent speech on race, I see no awareness of these ironies and no attempt to intelligently grapple with them. He is content to maunder about "complexity" and the need to "come together" despite our differences.

The deep question for Obama is not merely "how can America transcend race while continuing to have race-conscious policies?" but also "how can America transcend race as long as the one-drop rule remains intact?" Far from producing answers, Obama shows no recognition that these are even questions that need to be addressed. Meanwhile, Garry Wills in the current New York Review compares Obama's race speech to one of the great speeches of Abraham Lincoln. When I read this on the plane I almost lost my peanuts!

How embarrassing it is to see intellectuals like Wills and sophisticated magazines like the New York Review of Books and the New Republic fawn and grovel over Obama! You can be sure that if a white political candidate mouthed Obama's vague and vacuous nostrums, these liberals would not be issuing such hosannas. In this sense Geraldine Ferraro was right, not so much about Obama as about his white "amen corner." They are giving Obama something he has never asked for as a presidential candidate: intellectual affirmative action.

When did Martin Luther King die? It's been four decades since that event, but let's ask the question in its broadest light. Reflections on King's death are focusing on what he accomplished. Basically King led the movement to secure legal equality for African Americans and, by extension, all Americans. As a nonwhite immigrant I have benefited from the civil rights movement, and have never forgotten my debt to King. Without him America would have had Brown v. Board of Education but not the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Bill. King accomplished a lot.

But he failed in one key respect. King's dream was for America to become a color-blind society where we are judged not by the hue of our skin but by the content of our character. A telling phrase: many conservatives celebrate King's concept of a merit-based society. Yet King didn't say we should be judged by our merits; he said we should be judged according to character.

What happened to King's idea of a color-blind America? It has been stifled not by the Ku Klux Klan or the Southern segregationists. Remarkably it has been abandoned by the very civil rights activists who fought alongside King. Note that the greatest African American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, argued for a century that blacks wanted nothing more than to be treated equally under the law. Yet almost immediately after this legal equality was secured, through King's leadership, the NAACP and the other civil rights groups gave up on the idea of color-blindness and began to demand race and ethnic preferences.

The new civil rights orthodoxy was expressed in Cornel West's book Race Matters. West's argument is that it is naive to have color-blind laws and policies in a society where race till matters. Since race matters, we have to institutionalize race as the basis of public policy. Since race matters, we no alternative than to fight racial discrimination with state-sponsored racial discrimination.

The great irony, of course, is that when you institutionalize race in order to combat racism, you move further and further away from the ideal of a society where race ceases to count. First the civil rights movement fought for decades to get race out of university admissions, job hiring and government contracts; then after King's death, it fought to put race back. Yes, the argument was that "benign discrimination" is better than "invidious discrimination," although let us remember that all discrimination is benign to the one who benefits from it, and invidious to the one who pays for it.

King had his flaws, but in an age of racial charlatans like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, Americans of goodwill continue to wonder: where are you now, Martin Luther King? Have we lost your kind forever? Perhaps the best way to celebrate King's legacy is to recall and attempt to restore the color-blind ideal that he fought and died for.

Martin Luther King was gunned down on the balcony of his hotel 40 years ago. But he really died when his dream of a color-blind society was killed by his own followers.

Ever heard of Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson? He is a hateful, clueless pastor who makes frequent appearances on Sean Hannity's radio and television shows. Hannity is on the board of his BOND organization and says he is proud to be associated with him.

Reverend Peterson's purpose it come on air and say racist things against black people -- but get this, he's black himself. So that provides cover for the white people who love to hear him spew that hate. Then Hannity can say: I didn't say it, a black man did. Very clever.

If you thought Rev. Wright was divisive (and Hannity apparently thinks so because he talks about it every single night on his show), wait till you get a load of Rev. Peterson. Check out his unbelievable quotes below:





So, will Hannity denounce and reject Rev. Peterson? Will he step off the board of this hateful pastor's organization? Will he disassociate himself from him? Yeah, right. Don't hold your breath.


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Obama's decades-long support for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, combined with his refusal to completely disavow this man, suggest that beneath his calm exterior, Obama may be seething with racial resentment. So far he has managed to conceal it, while his wife Michelle Obama lets out the occasional petulant outburst. But inner rage is the only explanation for why the Obama family is so close to Wright. He articulates their deepest feelings about race in America, feelings that they know are imprudent to air politically.

Yet what do the Obamas have to feel resentful about? They are one of the truly privileged families in America. They both got an Ivy League education. They had the benefit of top graduate schools. They have held enviable jobs such as Michelle Obama's hospital post that pays more than $300,000 a year. They live in an upscale neighborhood very far removed from the drug and crime-infested ghettos of Chicago. So what do these two have to whine about? Would they trade places even for a week with a working-class white family?

Well, the standard answer goes, it's still painful despite one's advantages to live in a racist country. But how can America be a racist country if Obama has a serious shot at the presidency? How would it even be possible for Obama to win predominantly white states as he has been doing in the primaries? Would a racist country be likely to have allowed affirmative action and preferential programs to blacks in university admissions, job hiring and government contracts for nearly 40 years?

The Obamas seem to be experiencing what Ellis Cose years ago termed "the rage of the privileged class." Cose accurately identified the rage, although he could not diagnose its source. For many black leaders, there is one obvious source: white racism. Several years ago I debated Jesse Jackson at Stanford University and challenged him to show me a racism today that prevents his family or mine from achieving the American dream. Jackson admitted he couldn't, but then he said this merely showed that racism had gone underground, it was covert rather than overt, racism had now become institutionalized. To italicize his point Jackson went into some impressive rhyme schemes: "I may be well dressed, but I'm still oppressed," and so on.

The racism may have largely disappeared from view, but the rage of the privileged class is real. I think I know where this African American rage comes from. Imagine if you were Michael Jordan and someone said to you, "Every time you reach to dunk the ball into the basket, let's lower the net by six inches." This is basically what affirmative action does: it gives historically disadvantaged groups a break to compensate for the effects of past and present racism. Whatever the justification, however, the effect of such policies is to completely discredit the achievement even of competent beneficiaries. Michael Jordan's claim to be the greatest basketball player ever would be utterly destroyed if he played by a different set of rules as everyone else. And I wouldn't be surprised if Geraldine Ferraro were on hand to say, "Jordan only got where he got because of the color of his skin."

Consequently those who stand to benefit from racial preferences, as the Obamas may have done in gaining admission to university and graduate school, typically accept the subsidy while at the same time resenting the implication that they have gotten an unfair leg up. Their seething anger, however, is not directed toward affirmative action or toward the liberal paternalists who have implemented it. Rather, they ascribe generic blame to societal racism. In this weird framework, more affirmative action is then demanded to fight this unseen bigotry. Needless to say, the rage shows no signs of abating and only intensifies.

Want to learn more about all this? Read my book The End of Racism, a national bestseller which offers a vision for how we can truly transcend this destructive racialization of our society. Don't buy it to pay me reparations for the colonial subjugation of my ancestors over many centuries. Buy it because it's really good stuff.

Ever heard of the Obamorons? These are the morons who will cheer anything that Barack Obama says. Right now the Obamorons are wildly enthusiastic about their man's race speech, and are trying to persuade the rest of us to stop talking about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and move on to talking about how Obama is the next best thing since Jesus Christ.

Obama does have some very good qualities, but it's clear he also has a dark side that is only now beginning to surface. Consider his bizarre analogies aimed at vindicating the Reverend Wright. Many of us, he argues, "disagree" with things that our pastors and family members have said. True, but how many of us have pastors who say stuff like the Reverend Wright? It's one thing to sit quietly while my pastor says things I don't agree with about evolution or the Rapture, quite another for Obama to sit quietly while his pastor says that America deserved to be attacked on 9/11 and that the U.S. government deliberately injected AIDS into the country. My guess is that even in the black church "God damn America!" is not exactly standard rhetoric. Certainly the Reverend Martin Luther King didn't talk like that.

Especially bizarre was Obama's analogy between the Reverend Wright and his white grandmother. According to Obama, grandma too was given to racial "stereotypes" and at one point confessed to her fear of black men. First of all Obama didn't cite what stereotypes his grandmother held. A stereotype is merely a generalization: it may be true or false, harmful or benign. As the sociological literature on the subject shows, most stereotypes contain at least a grain of truth, because stereotypes develop out of popular experience.

As I document in my book The End of Racism, fears of black men are rationally explained as the consequence of the fact that black men have the highest violent crime conviction rate of any group in our society. One out of four young black men are at any given time in prison, on probation, or on parole. Some years ago Jesse Jackson admitted that if he heard footsteps in the dark and turned back to find out that the person was white, he would feel relieved. The point here is that Obama's grandmother's views, as relayed by Obama, seem rooted in empirical facts and bear no comparison with the Reverend Wright's maniacal ravings.

Besides, she's his grandmother! We choose our pastors and mentors but we don't choose our grandparents. When Obama calls the Reverend Wright "family," this is because he selected him as a friend and teacher. At any point during the past two decades, Obama could have walked away from the pew. Wright is not "family" in the involuntary sense that Grandma is family. In addition, Obama's grandmother made her remarks in private, within the sanctity of the household. The Reverend Wright has been shouting his doctrine from the pulpit for decades. Private prejudice is much less harmful than public hate speech.

Obama is smart enough to know all this. So what is the explanation for the bizarre moral equivalence that he seeks to create between his pastor and his grandmother? It cannot be that she treated him badly, since Obama himself says she loved him more than anything in the world. The only other explanation is that Obama is that Obama is more attached to the radicalism of the Reverend Wright than he is to his kind old grandmother. He is quite willing to protect Wright, and his own presidential prospects, by throwing grandma under the bus. Hell of a guy, right Obamorons?

By Jayar Jackson

The words and explanation from Senator Obama regarding his pastor's wildly unpopular and racist rant raised awareness for many, evoked conscious thought for others, but still turned some of his opponents away from him even more. How anyone could actually listen to the truth packed into this speech and conclude that his words were bogus was perplexing to me. Even after reaching out to the concerns of these very opponents, some still felt he was only telling them how much he was against them. I can understand that some don't agree with his policies, but I couldn't understand how they rejected the idea that race relations in need to be improved.

In an effort to practice what I preach, I've searched for a way to understand the reasons some still feel such resentment to the person that is thoughtfully looking for a route to move this country forward. I noticed that the most constant, blanket argument from the disagreeing mass was "Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a horrible racist." To that I thought, "I agree, good thing Wright isn't running for President. I'm glad Obama proved to us he doesn't think that way."

In attempting to put myself in the shoes of some White Americans, I've noticed that many are afraid of expressing everything they may think of minorities, particularly Black people. There have been instances where if they utter something that sounds like they're speaking negatively of a Black guy; the tag of "racist" is immediately slapped upon them. When they know they truly don't harbor racist or prejudiced feelings, and in fact dislike people that do, the worst thing in the world is to be considered just another racist White person. They've seen much of the dreadful history of truly hateful racist people in that opposed equality among the races, and they're sick of paying the price for things they never had anything to do with. Being misunderstood so quickly and easily causes feelings of resentment towards the accusing group, as they only wish these Black people could know what it's like to be in this situation. They may feel that Black people get a free pass in the game of racism. We get to say the N-Word we despise so much, while White people can't, we can dislike a White person for simply being who they are or for what some people that look like them did in the past.

When Reverend Wright opened his mouth in front of his congregation, he opened the door for the rare opportunity many White Americans took to call a racist a racist. No matter what explanations come, no matter how much Obama tried to take the discussion to a place of understanding and conclusion, Reverend Wright hasn't been lambasted enough by the man he taught, so the declaration of racist remains the only subject.

This feeling of making sure the other race experiences the pain felt by the other side of is nothing new. The country was fixated, racially divided, and somehow personally involved in OJ Simpson's "Trial of the Century." Upon hearing the verdict of not guilty, so many Black people celebrated as if we were the #16 seed of the NCAA Tournament that just took down the undefeated #1 powerhouse with a last second shot. Many Black Americans were overwhelmingly frustrated at the futility of the world's best judicial system to convict the many murderers in the past while obviously favoring White criminals over their Black victims.

The celebrating group didn't love the fact that OJ Simpson got away with killing two White people, they took delight in knowing so many people on the other side finally experienced what they had experienced so many times. Now they could say, "get over it, move on, and it wasn't your sister" the way they had been told so many times before.

Barack Obama's honest declaration that he cannot despise a pastor that brought him to his level of faith, married him to his wife, and baptized his kids kept this Reverend, an elephant-sized target in the crosshairs, right alongside him. The sooner we begin to understand each other, the sooner we will figure things out.

Upon reflection, I think Obama's speech was even better than I originally thought. Looking back at what he said several times now, it becomes apparent that it was a truly courageous speech. It was not Politics 101. It was not strictly damage control. He actually tackled the issue of race and tried to get white Americans and black Americans to understand one another.

The other reason that I loved it is because he understands the genius of America -- that we continually change to make this country a more perfect union. It's not that we can do no wrong; it's that we can recognize when we do and correct it. This is what makes us continue to get better and better as a country and why we stand out from the rest of the world. He understands the essence of what makes us the shining light unto the world.

Listen to the clips we picked out from the speech here and our quick analysis to get a sense of what this speech so different than almost any other political speech:





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The barrage of clips showing Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years using incendiary and highly offensive racial language surfaced last week, threatening to leave a huge blemish on the campaign of the Democratic frontrunner. After first trying his hand at the cable news network cycle, looking to explain his affiliation with a man that could think this way about , Obama stepped out to a podium in Philadelphia on Tuesday and truly spoke to the American people. The speech was highly regarded as historic, breathtaking, and extremely thought provoking. The reason so many think so is because it's true.

Opponents to this speech entered with closed ears, looking for a way to continue to find something wrong with the situation. We wanted to know, "Does Obama believe these things" and why didn't he leave a church led by a pastor with such negative racial feelings towards White America?" Not only did he answer these important concerns, but he felt the need to explain where these horrible thoughts and feelings came from, feelings that he repeatedly said he doesn't agree with, but this was proven anyway as this speech understood the multitude of mindsets in based upon race.

The angry mob that tuned in looking to hear simply that Obama rejects and condemns this man knew that wasn't going to be enough to pacify them. That politically standard response to such a firestorm would have just led them to cry out, "why didn't he leave him alone? It's because he's racist, too!" Upon hearing a devastatingly intelligent and painfully truthful speech that relates to everyone, the only thing he left his conveniently deaf opponents was their original charges he had already addressed.

With open eyes and ears, they would have understood that his explanation of the origins of Reverend Wright's racist thoughts were from his experiences of racism and discrimination. If we don't understand where these thoughts came from, they will simply continue to produce more racists. Obama was trying to avoid this. Racists are blind to other people's lives so that they can continue to see them as sub-human. This is what Martin Luther King fought with, words and understanding. If he fought back the way many of the oppressed wanted to, these racists would have kept thinking that Black people are just wild animals that don't have the intelligence or character to reason. Their blind hate would have been validated. Understanding others kills this blindness. Obama was tearing down the root of Rev Wright's WRONG AND RACIAL feelings. He condemned them, but some don't want to understand that. When we don't try to understand, we never get anywhere.

The lack of the knee jerk answer that his opponents were expecting threw everyone for a loop. Obama pointed out that Rev. Wright brought him to his level Christianity; so obviously, this isn't all he preaches about. Do we really think that Obama would step into the Oval Office and proceed to try to oppress and keep down White people? Since we've now heard some of the things that his pastor believes, some automatically mold the two into one person. We are not considering for Rev. Jeremiah Wright for President. We have to remember what the bottom line is: What does this have to do with how he will lead the country?

Once we make up our minds to simply close them and look for something, anything wrong, we have decided to do exactly what Senator Obama courageously warned against for 37 minutes. We will have decided to be no better than the people that rejected Martin Luther King's aspirations for racial tensions to be lessened through words that lead to understanding. Are we going to listen to Barack Obama's words or will we close our eyes and ears to a way to move forward in this country?