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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (54988)	3/21/2008 5:48:08 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542089

Hearing The Obama Speech ______________________________________________________________ By Richard Reeves* Syndicated Columnist MARCH 19, 2008 uexpress.com LOS ANGELES — If Barack Obama is elected president, his speech on race in America will be remembered as one of the greatest in the country's history. If he loses, it will still be remembered as a terrific speech, an astonishing display of grace under pressure. Those who care about the American dilemma — a racial history that contradicts our stated beliefs — will filter their perceptions through their own life experience, their own political bias, their own emotional stake in this particular election. Whatever the political effect, however, the man obviously said what he really thought. He told the truth: We are all racists. That does not mean that we are all prejudiced, but it does mean we notice the color of the people around us, and that affects the way we think and talk and act. And he was probably right about most of us, black and white, when he asserted that our racism is generational, that old men like Pastor Wright and me have more trouble dealing with race than do our children and, I expect, than our grandchildren will. That's the way it is. We are on a long trail to a post-racial society — we may never reach the end — and this election will give some indications how far along we really are. There is nothing new about this reluctance to talk openly and truthfully when we are in mixed-race situations. A national election is not a barbershop or a family kitchen, where people sometimes speak their own truth to each other. The men who wrote our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution avoided honest written dialogue about black slavery. (There is irony watching actors do it in the current HBO series "John Adams.") Fifty years later, Alexis de Tocqueville studied relations between the races in "Democracy in America" and concluded that either the majority whites would one day deport or kill the minority blacks — with intermarriage, as opposed to sexual mingling, being the only other option over the coming centuries. In 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal was more optimistic in "An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy," concluding that democracy might very well prevail over racism. Twenty-four years later, after significant integration and movement toward affirmative action, the country was hit by a plague of black rioting in major cities. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders began its lengthy report on the reasons for that violent unrest, beginning with this sentence: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal." What is new this time is that a real live politician running for the nation's highest office in a country still divided was willing to speak the truth about this, risking his own future to perhaps make ours better. Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy spoke some of these truths, but only after they had safely been elected to the country's highest office, and their words, many of them brilliant and honest, were cushioned by the sanctity of position, the aura of the Oval Office with its expectations that the dilemma might be resolved by the idea that our words could cushion our deeds. Of those presidential words, I remember best those spoken by Kennedy in 1963 as state officials attempted to block the entry of the first "Negro" students to the University of Alabama. I was the editor then of a small newspaper in New Jersey, the Phillipsburg Free Press, and repeated those words in print, Kennedy's finest, as I do now: "This is not a sectional issue ... nor is it a partisan issue. This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone. ... We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public schools available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him ... then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?" I was proud to be a young American when I listened to that all those years ago. I am proud of the progress we have made since then. I was proud as an old American to hear a black man, a politician, match them last Tuesday. ______________________________________________ *Richard Reeves is a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the former Regents Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He has also taught political writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His weekly column has been distributed by Universal Press Syndicate since 1979 and appears in such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and Dallas Morning News. He is a former chief political correspondent of The New York Times and has written extensively for numerous magazines including The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (54988)	3/21/2008 6:37:11 PM
From: quehubo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542089

The next president and legislature will have many hard decisions to be made. Do you think all these people listening to hate speeches like Wright's are going to some how or another feel good that a black man has made it to the White House? They certainly dont appear to mind deriding successful blacks. Getting something done is expected to be translate to bigger social programs by many Obama supporters. We cant afford the ones we have with or without Iraq. One has to wonder how much of the social programs we have now have contributed to the economic standings of black americans. My neighbors are from Jamaica in a bigger house than mine. I dont hear them bitching, in fact I rarely see them because they are always working. They must have missed the indoctrination about life in America. Immigrants dont seem to have a problem succeeding.