Obama calls for end to US racial ‘stalemate’
By Sasha Isenberg | Wednesday, March 19, 2008 | The Boston Globe
“…In response to calls to condemn provocative sermons by his former pastor, Barack Obama yesterday delivered one of his own: a frank reflection on the problems of race in America that rejected the minister’s words but also drew a broader personal and historical context in which to read them.
‘Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,’ Obama declared in a speech his advisers said would be among his campaign’s most important. ‘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.’
Offering nuanced lessons of his own biography, Obama presented himself as a figure uniquely able to communicate across lines of race and religion. As he has often during the campaign, Obama suggested that the crucial cleavage in American life is instead the generational one: the 66-year-old Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and his peers, he said, had let ‘questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview.’….”…BS
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