My Response to Obama's Race-Baiting Speech

Senator Obama has graced us with yet another racially-charged, finger-pointing speech this morning. He says that race has only just now become an issue in his campaign, because of the recent media attention given to Reverend Wright.
Well I have to raise the BS flag. Obama has made race an issue throughout his campaign, from the earliest speeches until now - and I'm sure he will continue to do so.

Portions in black are from Obama's speech this morning in Philadelphia. The parts in blue are my reaction.

.
.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. This man pretends that this is the first time he’s mentioned his racially mixed background, when in fact his entire campaign is built on it.
.
I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners -- an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. Huh? The blood of slaves and slaveowners?
.
I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. The first positive thing I’ve heard a liberal say about the United States in a long time – maybe years. But wait - he'll refute it. Because his "story" is one of dengrating this country and everything it stands for. Keep reading.
.
Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African-Americans and white Americans. I think this shows us that either Senator Obama doesn’t know much about South Carolina, or is intentionally using the imagery of the Confederate Battle Flag to incite racial division. Because while the flag may still fly over the state, the population of South Carolina is overwhelmingly black. Either he knows this and is misleading people, or he should know this.
.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn. Actually, his earliest speeches were all about race. The first speech I heard him deliver on this campaign was all about how amazing it was that a black man, with a black name, could get this far in tlife, in such a racist country. It's also funny he should use the word divisive here. When he said, “We have CEOs who make more in ten minutes than the average worker makes in a year,” he was drawing racial lines. Because he pointed an accusing finger at corporate CEOs, who are predominately white, but he never mentioned professional athletes – who also make more in ten minutes than the average worker makes in a year – but are predominately black.

Very few people noticed this. No one in the Obama camp noticed it. They don’t want to hear it – all they want to show you is their own blind allegiance to the “movement.”.
.
On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation -- that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Rev. Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Actually, I think we’re beyond questions. Twenty years beyond questions, in fact. You don’t stay with a church or with any other organization for twenty years unless you agree implicitly with its message, PERIOD. And you don’t, now that you’ve been caught, suddenly denounce those horrible statements in front of the cameras. Either you believe it, or you don’t – and if you stick with it for twenty years, you believe it. Don’t insult my intelligence now.
.
And let's stop pretending that Wright is his former pastor. He is still an active religous and spiritual mentor to the Obama family.
.
Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely -- just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed. Yeah. I’ve heard my pastor (and a priest and a rabbi) scream “God damn America!” over and over again, while the folks in the church shout “Yes Lawd!” Yup, that’s happened lots of times.

In all seriousness, I did hear a pastor use the N word a long time ago. This was in South Carolina, when I was about sixteen years old. I never went back to that church, and I advised everyone I could not to go there, either. See, here’s the difference: I denounced that crap back then, as opposed to sticking with the church for twenty years and only just now – now that the pressure is on – denouncing the bad parts of the message.
.
Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. Of course. He’s never said anything negative about anyone. He’s a wonderful man. He’s a pillar of the community. Oh, and, uh, GOD DAMN AMERICA.
.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, 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. So, even Obama’s own grandmother was a racist, even though he can’t point to her without pointing out her race (she’s not “my grandmother,” she’s “my white grandmother.”
.
We can dismiss Rev. Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. He’s comparing Wright’s statements (“God damn America”) to Ferraro’s statements (that Obama wouldn’t be where he is today if he were white)? Uh huh, those are the same. Yup.
.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through -- a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. Typical liberal issue-clouding. The comments that have been made and the issues that have been raised in recent weeks reflect Barack Obama’s ongoing relationship with known racists and anti-semites. Not the “complexities of race in this country.”
.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we never miss an opportunity to bring it up, do we?
.
But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
Legalized discrimination -- where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments -- meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.
That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families -- a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.
And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods -- parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement -- all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
Typical punitive liberal race-baiting. More and more and more – any excuse to remind us of what’s wrong with (and what’s always been wrong with) the United States. No wonder his wife isn’t proud of the USA. But I remember that all of the schools I attended were integrated.
.
And it means taking full responsibility for own lives -- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny. Yup, taking full responsibility – as long as the government pays for our health care. Right? And since when does ‘”taking full responsibility” mean demanding (the government demanding, that is) more from other people? The government telling us what (or how) to teach our children?
.
We also see the use here of one of Senator Obama’s favorite words: DESPAIR. See, these people would have you believe that this country is in a state of despair, and that only HE has the moral fortitude to offer hope in the face of that despair.
.
We as a nation – as a PEOPLE, regardless of race, regardless of the color of our grandmother, and regardless of our own individual economic standing, MUST REJECT this pessimistic world view. We must realize that this is the GREATEST nation on the face of the earth. Far from being something to be ashamed of, far from being something that needs to be FIXED at its foundations, this country has given each of us far more than each of us has given her.
.
We as a nation need to realize, once and for all, that in this country all people are given the same opportunities. If this is not true, then I challenge anyone out there to show me definitively where a BLACK MAN doesn’t have the exact same opportunities that I (as a white man) have.
.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination -- and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past -- are real and must be addressed. So everything that’s wrong with this country is all about the black community? What about what’s wrong elsewhere? What about what’s not wrong with the black community? Is it up to the rest of us to fix your poverty? Once again, we see the punitive liberal world view at work. These are people who believe that it’s not my place to ensure that I have a job – it’s the government’s place to ensure that. It’s not my place to see to it that I have insurance, if I need it – it’s the government’s. And it’s not my sole responsibility to put food on my table – it’s the government’s responsibility.
.
Every time you walk into a Subway or a Quizno’s or any other retail establishment, you check the prices of the goods offered. If they’re too high, then you have too choices. You can either walk out, or pay the too-high prices. The liberal world view holds that these prices are too high because of some intentional, evil plot to segregate society into the haves (the whites) and the have-nots (everyone else, with a few enlightened whites thrown in to tell the rest of us how wrong we are). Invariably, those who cling to this world view fall into the have-nots. It’s a way of justifying failure.
.
What would happen if those same have-nots suddenly came to the painful realization that their own failure is just that? What if they suddenly woke up and saw that they have the exact same opportunities in this country as I have, but that, by buying into this whole us-versus-them mentality, they’ve let those opportunities pass them by?
.
It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper. If you want to raise my taxes (according to one estimate I’ve seen in the past two weeks, by something like $800 BILLION) in order to pay for the health insurance of millions of people who won’t go out and get jobs to feed their own families, then you shouldn’t talk about one person’s dreams coming at the expense of someone else.
.
Folks, this is the most egregious example of race-baiting, of racially-biased pandering to the lowest common denominator I’ve ever seen. It’s exactly this kind of divisive, wedge-driving, hate-inducing speech that turned me away from the Democratic Party in high school.
What we need in this country is NOT more race crap. We do NOT need to be told YET AGAIN how bad white people are and how downtrodden black people are. What we need is more individual responsibility. We need stronger families. We need the government to get the hell out of our lives and out of our pockets.
.
We need to act like a country again, and not like a bunch of whining babies, crying about how the big kids took our toys. You have all the same opportunities I have. Can a black man not vote, same as me? Can a black man not get hired, same as me (qualifications assumed)? Take responsibility for your own goddamn life, and quit blaming Whitey. Because I don’t give a shit about your race; I don’t give a shit if you’re white or black, yellow, brown, green, whatever. I don’t care if you’re gay, straight or other, and I don’t care where you came from. It’s not my fault if you don’t have whatever you want or need in life. It’s yours.