Obama's Speech in Response to the Wright Controversy

Hmm... Obama is trying to compare his grandma to Wright. How can I be certain this comparison is valid if he doesn't go into the specifics?

 

It is convenient for him NOT to go into specifics since his Grandma, the woman who fed him, took care of him, raised him, isn't alive to defend herself. If Obama plans on winning the General election he's going to have to get a little more SPECIFIC. Just like he has to get more specific with his other policies instead of him saying he won't be like Bush.

 

I strongly suspect that Obama did not wake up 20 years ago and say to himself "Holy sh** I'm black."

From wikipedia

Of his early childhood, Obama writes: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[22] The book describes his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.

Sounds like Barak was dealing with his "blackness" from an early age.

Barak also went to college in NYC and Boston, where he was certainly treated like a black. And you gotta know that at Columbia and Harvard other students' initial reaction to Barak was that he was there thanks to affirmative action and not solely on merit.

 

Barak was not comparing his grandma to Wright. No wonder you are

 

Please... Most people in Hawaii aren't as racist as the mainland and don't view you black or white. Most people in Hawaii come from multi-racial families. I highly doubt they treated him as they do here in the mainland. I can see how things changed for him once he entered the mainland which was later in life not EARLY.

 

I didn't say he just realized he was black! I said he got in touch with his Black culture once he got to the Trinity Church.

 

Yeah!!!!

I want to know exactly what she said. Along with the exact dates and times.

Its just like all those other speeches he gives about hope and change. All i hear is change, change, change but i want specifics i don't care if his speech is six hours long and i can get all the specifics from his website.

 

Good piece by Robinson...

Allow me to repeat this part...

That's a leader folks.

 

That's perfectly fine as long as Obama supporters direct those voters to his speech. I didn't hear his speech given at the 04 convention. I heard it later after the word of mouth.

As Wright's statements have spread virulently through Youtube, it's their campaign's hope that his current speech will too.

 

Greenwald writes well...

 

You know what I find interesting is that line about his White Grandmother.

Obama says....
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.

Ok what street was her Grandmother walking in Hawaii that made her scared? Madelyn Dunham admitted Barry to the most prestigous school Punahou in Hawaii. They lived in a high rise apartment. A woman of that nature wouldn't need to be scared of Black people in Hawaii where the population of blacks is less than 2%. As I said, most Hawaiians are not as racist as us mainlanders. Do I see a potential lie here? The fact that he brings his white Grandmother into his speech is just low.

So Obama had it rough growing up in Hawaii? He went to the top school, lived in his Grandma's HIGH Rise. O yea, he knows what its like to suffer.

Some of his own classmates even dismisses what Obama says about race during his childhood.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/14/politics/main2567770_page2.shtml

Dan Hale, the 6-foot-7-inch star center of the 1979 Punahou basketball team, said Obama's depiction of Hawaii as a place where race really mattered hardly resonates with him.

"I was certainly oblivious to a lot of what he references," Hale said in an interview. "If you look at our teams, that year I was the only white guy on the starting five. You had three part-Hawaiians, one Filipino and me."

Most of his teachers and friends express sorrow that they did not know of Obama's racial anguish or inner demons. "I wish I would have known that those things were bothering him, or if they did bother him," said Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher from grades nine through 12. "Maybe we could have helped him. But he seemed to have coped pretty well."

Others are more skeptical that the boy known as Barry felt the angst described by Barack. Furushima said that many of her classmates have expressed dismay at Obama's rendering of the past.

"We are just such a mixed-up bag of races. It was hard to imagine that he felt that way, because he just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time," she said. "We have so many tones of brown here. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian or black."

His middle school yearbook captures the multiracial mood that many Hawaiians say has always defined the "Aloha spirit." In front of a chalkboard with "Mixed Races of America" written in a student's hand, Obama waved the peace sign for the camera.

On the lower half of the seventh-grade page is the same group, under a heading of "Useless Races in America." The joke, it seems, is on intolerance.

"In Hawaii, our diversity defines us; it doesn't divide us," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, a close friend of Obama's father in graduate school in the early '60s. "We all come from so many backgrounds, we have to get along."

Obama's teammates for the most part are careful not to judge an old friend, even if his memories of racial attitudes at Punahou differ from their own. "I would never say, ah, that didn't happen," said Hale. "But I was pretty wrapped up in my own world back then."

If Obama did show flashes of anger or hurt, according to friends and teammates, it sprang from his lack of minutes on the basketball court more than his angst as a young black man in a multiracial society.

So what racial struggle did he experience as a young boy?

He is starting to sound more like a Liar to me. How could he even dare bring up his Grandma and talk about his childhood experience in his lavish Hawaii experience?

 

Obama is getting exposed

 

Umm, his grandparents grew up in Kansas. His mom was born there. After that, they moved to California, Texas, and Washington state at various times before moving to Hawaii. So his grandmother had at least 30-40 years of her life to have streets where she might fear black men before moving to Hawaii.

Better yet, for all of you who are talking about him pissing on her grave and the like, she's still alive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madelyn_Dunham

It's almost like fact-checking doesn't matter - people just throw things out there and see what sticks. And not surprisingly, plenty of gullible people just read it and assume it's true, and then re-post to other places to con others into believing it.

 

yes major but Grandma Dunham raised Barry in Hawaii when he moved there at the age of 10 from Indonesia. What black men did she see in Hawaii that scared her to make her say some racist comments to Barry Obama? What racial divide was he experiencing growing up in Hawaii? He still called his grandma a racist on national tv. Shameful.

 

He nailed it. The American political landscape has trapped and pigeonholed black politicians into a continuum between "not black enough" and "too black".

So far, the media debate on Obama's "racial cred." has been framed around some abstract pendulum shifting between those two points.

Obama is going with the reasoned approach, perhaps because he had no choice, the old political plays were to distance away from Wright and risk alienating the black vote and call to question his 20 years of association. Even if there were that calculation, which seems unlikely, there's so much to his speech that sounds genuine and something that few politicians can pull off.

While I know this is far from settled, his speech gives me great confidence on his ability in responding against GOP smears in the general election.

 

Dude, do you have some sort of Grandma fetish? Talk about attacking a straw man. The point he made about his grandma is one paragraph in a 45 minute speech. You've spent several pages of this thread attacking one nuance of this guy's point, completely taking it out of context, repeating your argument over and over, with little to no support from anyone else on your argument.

This speech is about concepts much bigger than Obama's grandma or even his pastor. It's about race, and how race is used as a distraction in politics to keep Americans from coming together to support progressive change. And you're perpetuating this very problem, by focusing in on his dead white grandma instead of talking about how he's right; that politicians use fear of arab terrorists and illegal immigrants to control us, to distract us from true change.

Shameful? You're shameful. Shameful for not pulling your head from your rear and seeing the big picture.

 

Yeah, I'd say that throwing your white grandmother under the bus to save your political a$$ is a shameful thing to do... Hey, he's desperate to get Jeremiah Wright off of the youtube loop, so whatever it takes I guess. Sickening... Expect Jeremiah Wright to be a pretty famous guy in... oh I don't know, the month of October.

Obama and His 'White Grandmother'
By JAMES TARANTO
March 18, 2008

Barack Obama took the stage this morning to give what was billed as a "major speech on race." It was, of course, an attempt to rescue his campaign from the revelation that his so-called spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, espouses a virulently anti-American and antiwhite worldview called "black liberation theology."

Here is the part of the speech that bothered us most:

I can no more disown [Wright] 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.
Our first thought was that it was pretty low of Obama to exploit his (still living) grandmother in this way. Is it really necessary for the whole world to know about her private expressions of prejudice? Doesn't simple decency dictate that a public figure treat embarrassing facts about loved ones with discretion?

Obama was trying to accomplish something very specific by dragging his "white grandmother" into this political mess. He was trying to diminish Wright's hateful theology by implying that it too is a private matter. Said Obama:

For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.
That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Rev. Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.
Note how Obama elides the difference between a comment at the "kitchen table" and a sermon delivered to a congregation of thousands and recorded on DVD.

Obama rightly faulted his spiritual mentor for using "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." But he tried to treat Wright's most outrageous comments as if they were aberrations rather than the most extreme expressions of an extreme ideology:

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Rev. 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.
What Obama is evading is that this "profoundly distorted view" is not just some passing emotion. It is what Wright himself, in the "talking points" page of his congregation's Web site, describes as "systematized black liberation theology." As we noted yesterday, Wright credits James Cone of New York's Union Theological Seminary with having undertaken this systematization. Here again is Cone's description of black liberation theology:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.
So here we have, on the one hand, an old white woman who would be completely ordinary and anonymous but for her grandson's astonishing political success, and who harbors some regrettable prejudices; and, on the other, a leader in the black community who uses his pulpit to propagate an ideology of hate.

Obama said this morning, "I have asserted a firm conviction--a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people--that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union."

But if he cannot speak out unequivocally against the public, organized bigotry of his spiritual mentor, how can he possibly live up to this promise?

www.wsj.com

 

If you put the whole speech into context, what you will find is that this is a piece to justify why it is understandable for him to continue to have ties to Wright and his church. His grandma, Ferraro and the black history were used examples to support this argument.

 

Great! I think reporters will find her out and ask what she thinks

 

Will Bush or McCain sever ties with the controversial comments of their pastors/spiritual leaders?

Actually, he doesn't justify Wright's comments, rather Obama wants to shift the focus to a greater social issue dividing the US for the past 30 years. If he threw his grandmother under the bus, then he also threw the black community and his white ancestry under the bus as well.