In my last post many people mentioned how white Jeremiah White looks. I agree, and clearly he has some Caucasian blood in his family tree. He grew up in Philly, by the way, and his school (Central High) was 90% white, so I’d venture to say he has had plenty of experience and exposure to the white population. Whether that is what caused him to hate whites, and thus, part of his own heritage, I do not know.
I’m not shocked that Obama has maintained and defended his relationship with Wright this long. I’m shocked that he finally separated himself from Wright since there is much evidence to show that Obama feels the same way as his mentor. Would we expect anything different from a man whose mentor is a racist? This is a friendship that could cause irreparable damage to Obama’s campaign yet Wright is such a hate monger that he refused to retract anything he said. In spite of the potential to jeopardize and derail the campaign, he not only reiterated previous comments, he made more, forcing Obama to distance himself from him. I’m sure that was tough, since Obama has put in writing many of the same ideas that Wright has said out loud.
These are quotes from Obama’s book “Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” Note that they are in the written form, but not in the audio book. After reading this, his allegiance to Jeremiah Wright should come as no surprise; Obama echoes the same sentiments, albeit not on a pulpit, about his own struggle with his “mother’s race.” I find it hard to believe that he has overcome all his feelings of hatred toward 50% of his heritage and even harder to believe that he will do much to bring blacks and whites together. And my doubts were erased when it took him so long to denounce, so to speak, what Wright has been preaching. We’re all worried that Obama is far to the left, that he has socialist tendencies… I think the biggest issue is that he is a big, fat, hypocrite.
Enjoy the quotes, I hope you get the same warm, fuzzy feeling that I did. (Please note that Obama’s book was published when he was but a babe in the woods at 34 years old and not yet in politics. He has since said: “Certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.” Indeed.
“There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”
He added: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.” (Referring to life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.)
“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when i began to suspect that by doing do i was ingratiating myself to whites.”
“The minority assimilates into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture should be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be non-racial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals.”
“Reverend Wright shrugged. ‘Some of my fellow clergy don’t appreciate what we’re about. They feel like we’re too radical.”
“In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them.”
“I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.”
“That hate hadn’t gone away, blaming white people – some cruel, some ignorant – sometimes a single face, sometimes a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”
“Never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, the son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.”
“And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged.”
“That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you were deserving of their scorn. White folks.”
“Ray assured me that we would never talk about whites as whites in front of whites without knowing exactly what we were doing.”
“Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on or off at our pleasure.”
“Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a whole host of limitations.”
“A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in the country…Yes the nationalist would say, the whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you.”
So basically come November if Ocaca gets the nomination for the Dems…The Republicans will have a field day with the racist oreo cookie.
In fairness to Obama, that last line appears to be Obama outlining the average black nationalist’s view of whites, not necessarily his own. He even seems to be criticizing its use by some black politicians to “make up for a whole host of limitations”.
Obama is mulatto (half black); Wright is quadroon (one fourth black) and Charlie Rangel in octoroon (one eight black). Most African Americans have a racially mixed heritage.
Zhangliquin- Ok, let’s omit the last quote to b fair. It doesn.t make the rest of the list stink any less.
Tio- Of course most African Americans have some white ancestry. But in this case it’s not a matter of condemning one’s roots from 3 or 4 generations ago. Obama made these comments about whites and his own mother and grandmother, who raised him after his black dad abandoned him, were white. So much hatred against the race of the only two people who loved and cared for him makes no sense except that he, like Wright, is consumed with self-loathing.
“Zhangliquin- Ok, let’s omit the last quote to b fair. It doesn.t make the rest of the list stink any less.”
Oh trust me, this guy is not getting my vote. It would be far easier for a homicide detective to get the smell of a badly decayed corpse found in August out of his clothes than for Obama to get the stink of Wright out of him.
Am sure some white redneck took his lunch money at some time in school.
Zhangliquin and Peter- LOL!
From the liberal (sorry, dirty word on this site)use of quotation marks, to the absence of asterices to denote that the citer is pulling passages out of context, it’s impossible to know who said what to whom from your except. I read the book — some of those passages I recognize are Obama’s, some Wright’s, some are paraphrases of what friends told him. Therefore, it’s impossible for a reader who hasn’t read the book to make a case against Obama.
A large part of finding one’s identity is to assess one’s ancestry. My parents are Cuban, and I’ve known people whose parents languished in Cuban prisons for speaking out against the regime, but that hasn’t stopped me from feeling repulsed and (yes) hatred at the paranoia I hear expressed on WQBA AM; that’s life! Your family and friends say shit that triggers hatred all the time. It’s a dialectic! Mrs. Clinton seems like such an automaton because she’s never looked at herself in the mirror. I’m not sure what you want out of a politician.
In the memoir Obama, probably more honestly than he ever would again, traces the maturation of his political beliefs. It’s fairly clear that, by the time the far less impressive The Audacity of Hope is published, he’s settled most of his ambivalences.
Obama’s not a savior: he’s a pol of uncommon intelligence who knows that words count. It’s a plus, but it certainly doesn’t immunize him against the diseases afflicting his fellow pols. There’s an interesting mix of calculation, cynicism, and optimism in him unlike I’ve seen in my lifetime (to be fair to McCain, he’s got some of this too, but you can see the strain of the pandering to the religious right in his face). Whether he’ll be an effective president (forget great — I don’t demand great presidents) remains to be seen; but we need characters like this.
Thin White:
You can be a liberal and visit this site. How else can liberals learn? 🙂
And you can equivocate all you’d like about Obama’s comments in his book, it does not change the fact that he has made very racist remarks. Just because he made them before he was a senator and didn’t think they would come back to bite him in the culo doesn’t erase them and doesn’t make him any less bigoted. Did he really settle his ambivalences by the time he wrote the last book? Well OF COURSE! He had a political career to think of and damage control to issue after his first book. I’m not naive enough to think that he has settled a lifetime of race issues just because he sat down to write a book. If that were the case, he would have denounced the anti-white, anti-semite, anti-American, Jeremiah Wright a long time ago. That alone speaks volumes.
Also, if you would care to identify which of the comments were made by Wright I will be happy to make a correction.
“…but we need characters like this.”
But WHY? You don’t even give us anything like a reason.
You say he’s just like other pols and is a strange mix of cynicism, opportunism, “knows that words count” (whatever that means), and that even you have no idea if he would be a good president. But all you’ve given us is a confused array of nothingisms (like Obama himself and his supporters) that’s somehow supposed to convince us that we need him.
Balance these presumably “good points” against run of the mill leftism with more than a dash of “black liberation theology” marinated into him for decades at Wright’s church and on college campus. (And also consider what should be obvious but somehow isn’t — that no white pol would ever survive even a momentary association with a “white liberation theology” pastor, never mind 20 years’ worth.)
Why exactly do we need this character again?
OK Todo el Mundo –
I can understand some of Rev. Wright’s anger from the “old days,” so close to being “White” – in fact about the same as Fulgencio Batista – but not quite. If he is real and not acting (as he might well be) I can identify. I am 50+, “Caucasian,” more or less look like a Swede or German right down to the “Blond-Gray” hair and blue eyes – and Jewish-
conceived in CUBA by the way, born in the USA. In the old days I could “pass” anywhere. Some old stupid stuff came up here and there. I was a shtarker and could and did defend myself. All of that stuff is now +/- 40 years old. I have moved on. Too bad the Rev. Wright hasn’t.
-S-
I don’t think Obama shares Wright’s extremist views, but what is clear is that Obama is not the man of change. He is an opportunist — no better than a common politician. The Hawaiian educated Harvard elitist moves to South Side of Chicago and needs an inroad to the Black populace, so who better than Rev. Wright and his huge church. He uses the Rev. to make a name for himself and gets involved in the extreme left circles. Then when he runs for Prez, he starts throwing the Rev. under the bus and only now when it is not convenient disavows him not because of the statements. Heck, the recent statements by Wright were the same ones he made a long time ago. Heck, the NY Times published the 9/11 comments made by wright before Obama announced his candidacy.
In other words, Obama has no loyalty except to Obama. Obama will sleep with the Devil if it benefits him and then disavow him when its no longer opportunistic.
To put it even more bluntly, Obama is so major leave full of s*it!. He talks about how he’s going to attack NAFTA and his aid tells Canada, “he’s just jiving to get elected.”
So in other words, not so bluntly, he will say or do anything to get elected and will abandon his so called “friends” when it no longer suits him.
He cannot be trusted.
Cigar Mike-
I agree with you, a hypocrite can not be trusted. Just as Obama’s comments about whites have turned out to not be politically expedient, neither has his friendship with Wright. Obama may not be as extreme as Wright but there is no denying that he wouldn’t have written an entire book of politically incorrect musings had he not actually believed in what he was saying.
He is a unloyal, self-serving, hypocrite.
Claudia, I don’t believe it’s self-loathing for either Obama or Wright, at least not primarily. I think it’s far more likely that they saw the chance to take advantage of the race card and ran with it. In both cases, it’s been pretty effective in practical terms. Wright’s doing damn well for himself, materially speaking, and Obama is close to a US presidential nomination. If Obama, with the exact same political track record and ideology, were a white guy like John Edwards, I seriously doubt he’d be where he is now. I agree with Geraldine Ferraro on that. In other words, I think there’s a lot of opportunism involved here, even if there are other things involved also.
Asombra:
Self-loathing in that he hates his mother’s race. Why else would he have gone to such great lengths in college to distance himself from whites? And then talk about it so much in his first book?
Is it just me, or does the photo with this post look like something out of a modeling portfolio, obviously done by a professional photographer to help sell the “model”? Man, this guy is starting to make Jesse Jackson look like a babe in arms. Well, almost.