Senator Barack Obama: ‘Race is
an issue that I believe this nation
cannot afford to ignore right now’
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Senator Barack Obama discusses his grandmother Madelyn Dunham; pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in a speech titled "A More Perfect Union" at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 (partial transcript/excerpt):
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety — the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing and clapping and screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain perhaps my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthens my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions, the good and the bad, of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown 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 her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are part of me, and they are part of America, this country that I love.
Now some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. And I suppose the politically safe thing to do would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank, or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep- deep-seated bias. But race is an issue that I believe this c- nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America. To simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.