Pastor Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity U.C.C., Barack Obama's church in Chicago, does not represent the pinnacle of African-American anger in America. The catch phrase of the angriest African-Americans is "400 years"-the sum of 250 years of slavery and 150 years of post-slavery era racism. The angriest want reparations, that is, payment today for uncompensated slave labor centuries ago.
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The angriest say, "The white Christian is Satan." Elijah Muhammad taught that blacks were the first people on the Earth but had been tricked out of their power and oppressed by whites (who were created by a scientist called Yakub), preached black sumpremacy, called for a separate nation, and founded the Nation of Islam. Within the Nation of Islam is where you find the angriest African-Americans, and the Autobiography of Malcom X is mandatory reading for understanding African-American anger.
Are we white Americans only comfortable when African-Americans keep their anger under cloaks? Anger and disaffection exist widely, but are we somehow damaged when our denial of it is punctured?
Barack Obama will be a great President. He shall not be disqualified because he has listened to a few angry African-Americans in his lifetime because they're impossible for him to avoid. A race of people who were unwillingly transported from a separate continent to perform uncompensated labor are justified to feel angry about it. That Barack Obama has never shown his own anger is commendable and demonstrates the emotional restraint which the Presidency requires.
Reverend Wright preaches Christianity. Until you hear Reverend Wright utter the battle cries of the very angriest African-Americans, relax.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln hypothesized that the longevity of the Civil War was God's just punishment for the national sin of slavery. That sounds pretty radical, but we consider him our greatest President.
Donald E. Coho
West Manchester Township
Obama's race speech is somewhere between the Chris Matthews' gushing characterization as Lincolnesque and Charles Krauthammer's opposite exaggeration of an "elegant fraud" I tend more toward the latter, as I'm sure most Pennsylvanians do outside of Philadelphia, where the sort of "prophetic speech" and "black liberation theology" heard in Obama's church is not accepted by an aging, conservative and "typically white" population.
Obama will be a great President? Are you nuts? He will NOT be a great President and neither will Clinton. They are both idiots.