Now to Obama's grandmother. There was a time spanning the 70's to the mid-90's when many blacks and whites in large American cities expressed the same feelings on street crime held by Obama's grandmother. Indeed, Reverend Jesse Jackson made similar comments in 1993 at a meeting of his organization, Operation Push, devoted to street crime. According to a November 29, 1993, article in the Chicago Sun-Times, he said, "'We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular.' Then Jackson told the audience, 'There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved....After all we have been through,' he said. 'Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.'"
Isn't that exactly what Obama's grandmother was referring to? To equate her fears, similar to Jesse Jackson's, with Wright's anti-American, anti-white, anti-Jew, and anti-Israel rantings is despicable coming from a grandson. In today's vernacular, he threw her under the wheels of the bus to keep his presidential campaign rolling.
For shame.
The man has a point.
3 comments:
The man ain't right. There's something missing in his soul.
She's white. Apparently that overwhelms what would normally be love, affection, and loyalty felt toward someone who cared for us as a child. The hatred runs to his core, through everything he believes.
Obama should have probably included some instances where he himself felt racist (but perhaps that is bigger than what any politician could do). To my mind, this criticism stubbornly misses the point of his speech, which was not that white people are evil, but that there are unfortunate thoughts in the minds of many Americans that are based on race (I think he used his grandma to show how all pervasive the problem is, even in those he loves). This is a fact that I somewhat see in myself, my family members, and in many other Americans that I have known (black and white). To deny this fact, to willfully misinterpret Obama's point as a call for hatred towards whites, strikes me as Stalinist style paranoia -- where everyone strains as hard as they can to interpret what an opponent says into a foregone conclusion. Now, I don't like what Wright said. Nor do I think that the best explanation of this is a dialog on race. But to imply that the dialog is evil and that any acknowledgment of thoughts categorizing people by race among our loved ones or other Americans need to be responded to with outraged anger (Obama's missing a soul, a vile speech) strikes me as terrifying and wrong.
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