For the first time in my adult life, I think that I actually support a candidate.
Here’s a link to the full text.
It’s the most honest and direct discussion of race in america that I’ve ever seen come out of the mouth of any politician. I found myself saying things like ‘wait, is he allowed to say that on TV?’ because he was making so much sense. The simple insight that to disown someone because they said something inexcusable leads only to deeper divisions and people afraid to speak their minds and unable to change them. You don’t change minds by disowning people … all they ever learn is not to talk that way in front of you.
The last semi-public figure I saw speak along those lines was my computer architecture professor at Michigan, Yale Patt. He disagreed with political correctness in the classroom, because he couldn’t convince people to change their minds without having both the wrong view and the right view out in public at the same time. “Put all the ideas on the same table and hit them all with the same broom, and the truth will come out,” were his words. This leads directly to one of my favorite lines of argument – “no, I don’t know what that means.” It works for technology and it works for bigotry.
Obama was undoubtedly politically unwise to respond at such length and in such detail to a very caustic situation. Politically, he should have thrown his preacher under the bus, in 45 seconds or less, and moved the story along. Instead he held forth for 40 minutes of coherent and lucid story.
“Coherent and lucid” don’t fit into a headline, and they don’t fit in the 30 second news cycle. Nuance is necessarily lost when you summarize … and so we’re left with people pissed off that he didn’t outright disown his pastor (How can he countenance a man who says racist things?), and others pissed off that he had the nerve to publicly repudiate his pastor (How can he throw away a 30 year relationship over a single sermon?)
I thought he put it well:
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. 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.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
…
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.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend 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.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
I think that watching the speech, or at least reading it, is well worth the time for everyone.
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