[Marxism] Obama race

[abu hartal <abuhartal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Has any other leading nominee (and I include Jackson) ever said anything 
remotely so detailed and truthful?


"Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this 
point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In 
fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial 
injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of 
the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be 
directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that 
suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. 

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed 
them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education 
they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap 
between today's black and white students. 

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, 
from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business 
owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were 
excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that 
black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future 
generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black 
and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of 
today's urban and rural communities. 

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration 
that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the 
erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may 
have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black 
neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular 
garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of 
violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. 

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his 
generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a 
time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was 
systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the 
face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; 
how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come 
after them. 

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the 
American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately 
defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was 
passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women 
who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without 
hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, 
questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in 
fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend 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 Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that 
the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger 
is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from 
solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in 
our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the 
alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is 
powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its 
roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between 
the races. "

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