Yeah, apparently I mad a false assumption, but it really doesn't change the bulk of my argument, but I will concede a huge error on my part. As I read over some of my remarks, I didn’t take the time to be as accurate as I would have liked to.

For the record, I’m going to be a lot more patient and deliberate in my further responses. I barely proof read my original, and I must admit, I responded to you as if I was responding to the entire group of posters here who agree with your position. Yes I do remember having a conversation about this kind of thing with you before now that you mention it.

Let me begin with this, you being white, or black or asian, or martian, is irrelevant. I shouldn’t have even argued from that point, but those were points I wanted to make and I used our discussion as an opportunity to make them. Hopefully other posters will feel compelled to discuss them.

We disagree on your premise. I don’t think Wright’s comments were racist, in any way.
I also think that there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with saying something divisive. Many feel it was divisive to imply that American foreign policy lead to the attack on the towers. I feel it was simply a statement of fact. Although I concede his remarks were divisive, they were only divisive in the sense that the typical American is ignorant of and oblivious to what the US gov’t is responsible for internationally. So it shocks their ears to hear someone speak a truth that shatters an illusion they have held closely for so long. The US is not an international force for good. The rest of the world is painfully aware of that, but Americans, are largely delusional when it comes to this. No different than when talking to a white man and a black man about the reality of the way the police operate.

Even if this is a "racist country," it remains impossible to argue that the white segment of United States, at large, is working singulary to the end of African American elimination.

Even if? You obviously do not understand institutional racism in the way that you claim to or you wouldn’t be making this argument. Institutional racism has little to do with the white segment working to the end of African American elimination. Again, your focus is on bigotry, prejudice, white people with bad intentions, and while I do think there is still plenty of that to go around, that’s only part of what I’m talking about when I say this is a racist country.
Institutionalized Racism in economics:

…is so insidious is because it yields racist outcomes even if people are not particularly prejudiced. It is insidious because it makes it possible for the failure of an agricultural program or a race riot decades ago to have an impact on people's economic situations today.
Wealth is passed from one generation to the next. This means that if, in previous generations, black people or native people had no wealth or had it stolen from them, they will have less now than whites. This has all the potential in the world to perpetuate itself.
Jobs and other business opportunities are often not advertised and go instead according to personal and family connections. Even without severe discrimination, in a racist society people have mostly friends and family of their own race. If the people with jobs and opportunities to give out are white, the people who get the jobs and opportunities will be white. This, too, has a self-perpetuating logic.

And still this quote is only dealing with one aspect of society, economics. So far from claiming there is a concerted effort to destroy black people, there is a cycle that repeats itself and will continue until there is acknowledgement that it is happening and then a concerted effort to undo it. And this isn’t about just black people here, eventually we will get to the point when we are talking about all races with common interests, fighting against being controlled by the rich, but unfortunately we have to walk through the door that deals with racism first, and it has proven incredibly difficult to do. Even as Americans become less bigoted and prejudiced over time, these inequalities reproduce themselves, poor people have poor children who go to prison and remain poor, and rich people have rich children who goto college or to daddy’s business. And because this society has been openly legally racist for about 90% of the time black and white people were here, I’d say we are still very much lving in a divided society, largely shaped by racism, where the rich are overwhelmingly white, and the poor are overwhelmingly non-white. And that’s not a coincidence or happenstance or ‘just the way the ball bounced’.

So no, I do not think Wright’s comments are going to make black people hate white folks, nor are they going to make black people violent against white people. The most damage they will do is hurt some white people’s feelings and possibly hurt Obama’s run. And again, amidst all of this talk about Wright’s alleged racism, we wont be making any headway at all in terms of understanding or dealing with real racism that has an impact on people’s lives. And mind you, I said the same thing with regards to Imus. Making stupid comments on TV isn’t what we need to be dealing with when we talk abut racism, this has all been a distraction from real meaningful discussion about racism.

I agree that in general the things he says are provocative and I think he means it to be and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. He leads an activist church, he needs to be provocative. Hes not saying these things for fun, hes saying these thing to make people move. I think he wants to light a fire inside people to fight for change, and I think focusing on ‘how much progress has been made’ is counterproductive (aside from the fact that neither he nor I, are particularly impressed with the ‘progress’ that you and others believe has been made.). The black community is complacent, yet still badly in need of change. In general, communities of any color do not fight for change when they are complacent. I think he is correct in pointing out the things out that he points out. I say some of these things often and I’m not angry or hateful or any of that, as I think many posters here who’ve met me can attest to. I say them because they are true and they shape my view of this country. I don’t get choked up when I hear the pledge of allegiance. The words god damn America don’t sound offensive to me. I am from a people who have been through a lot of bad things here, I see the effects of it everytime I walk out my door, so I don’t have the same feelings about this country that the average white person does.

In my previous post I spoke mainly about black vs. white perspectives because that is the dominant dynamic at work. That is really what this is about in the media and the political arena. Obama’s opponents correctly saw this as a way to damage his support among whites, who view Rev. Wright’s rhetoric as hateful, racist, incendiary, etc.

Again, he and I both misspoke about the Tuskegee experiment, and I don’t think the mistake in any way made the situation any worse than the reality. No the gov’t didn’t inject black men with syphilis, what it did is fail to treat them or notify them that they were infected which let them pass it on in their families and community, while the gov’t monitored them and watched them die. If you think that truth is somehow more benign than how Rev. Wright and myself misspoke, than I really don’t know what to say. I fail to see how that mistake makes his statement any more incendiary than the documented reality of what did happen.

And we definitely disagree in terms of how you interpret his remarks as being a concerted effort to make his congregants hate white people. You are concerned that he conveys ‘a provocative yet incomplete truth and that he does it deliberately, and I suppose you have your right to be concerned about that, but because you believe it to be true does not make it so. I am not so concerned because I don’t believe it to be true. If all the hell my people caught in this country hasn't made them hate white people in large numbers, certainly no sermon on sunday is going to accomplish that.

I want to get down to some things that he actually did say so we can analyze his exact words and not yours or my interpretation of them. Here is clip which Fox has been using.


This sermon is against the power structure, who in this country, are rich, white, people. They are his enemies, your enemies, and mine as well. Only one line in the political part of this sermon, is anappropriate, where he says Europeans fit the bill, and he doesn’t really clarify that, because obviously all Europeans don’t fit the bill, even based on the logic of his sermon. I dont think that was intentional either. Now, I’m a communist, so I wouldn’t say what he said in the same way, I’d be more accurate about the way I phrased it. I’d say your enemy is the ruling class, and it wouldn’t matter the race, religion or ethnicity of the people I’m talking to or about. The ruling class are our enemies. We want better wages they want to lower wages. We want restrictions on air pollution, they want to pollute to their heart’s content. They want wars over oil, we want alternative fuels and no war in Iraq. They are our enemies, and this is how I would phrase it.

Let me also say that, I don’t phrase it in that way to avoid pointing out that these people are white, I phrase it in that way because its more accurate to call them the ruling class then to say rich white people. I mean, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are rich white people, but I don’t see them as my enemy. George Bush, Dick Cheney, the board of directors of ExxonMobil are (mostly if not entirely) rich white people who I’d say are my enemies, but I call them the ruling class. I say it in that way because the ruling class puts more of an emphasis on their richness than their whiteness, and it is their richness which I take issue with. Rev. Wright probably isn’t sophisticated enough to understand this in this way, so he describes it in the way he and most black people in this country knows and understand it.

Power in this country is white. That’s how the black community understands the power dynamic in this country. And its true, its accurate and there is nothing wrong with saying it. Is there a better, more accurate, more sophisticated way to say it? Yes. But to say it in the way that Rev. Wright said it touches not just on the power of class but also on the power if racism; and I think that’s what he was trying to communicate. I think in general people who have a limited understand of the racial and power dynamic in this country, will be offended when it is spoken to. They get offended. But because they are offended doesn’t make their point legitimate.

^good post killa.

Killa's last post should be on the front page on the NY Times, to help us all understand how we view things when something happens and race is brought into the arena.

Initially, when confronted with Barack Obama he reminded me of Isiah Thomas. He is promising stuff(they are both great salespeople), and he has no real plan to make anything better. Being different than Bush/layden is no reason for some one to be in charge.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

That being said, since none of these candidates has any sort of plan for the real issue in this election, the economy, I am giving him a second look(I now think he will take pride in being the first black president, so I am less concerned about his experience). I don't particularly care about this whole controversey over the pastor. Barack was in a tough situation with this pastor. I don't think Barack is particularly aligned with anything that the reverand said. I do believe that it would be particularly tough for a black leader to rise in today's society. And, yes we do need a strong, and tough black leader to take care of things in the black community. Barack is a very smart lawyer, but people really need to understand that lawyers have no solutions to any of our problems. They mean well, but they are just throwing money at everything. They don't understand how things work, and they are very compassionate, but we don't have the money to spend on all the programs the democrats want. These are luxuries that we can't necessarily afford. We aren't what we used to be.

That being said, we need a vp candidate who understands the economy. I love bloomberg, the guy understands money and fiscal conservatism. I also, love romney at this point. I hated romney as a presidential candidate, because I did not trust him, however, as a vp, I think he would be great with a candidate like mccain(a guy with character)making the decisions. Forget about who the nominees are, we need someone on the ticket who can take care of this countries premier problem, which is the economy.

The topic of race and blood has always been an inflammatory one in this country. Ms. Piper broached it in a 1988 video installation and delivered some bad news. Facing us through the camera, speaking with the soothing composure of a social worker or grief counselor, she said that, according to statistics, if we were white Americans, chances were very high that we carried at least some black blood. That was the legacy of slavery. She knew we would be upset. She was sorry. But was the truth. The piece was titled “Cornered.”

And are we upset? I’ll speak for myself; it’s not a question. Of course not. Which is a good thing, because the concept of race in America — the fraught fictions of whiteness and blackness— is not going away soon. It is still deep in our system. Whether it is or isn’t in our blood, it’s in our laws, our behavior, our institutions, our sensibilities, our dreams.

- Holland Cotter NYT