Back in June, Barack Obama made, what I thought to be, a rather callow and divisive remark while giving a speech at Hampton University:
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.
The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.
"This administration was colorblind in its incompetence," Obama said at a conference of black clergy, "but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane.
"All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see," he said.
Obama's criticism of Bush prompted ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 people gathered in Hampton University's Convocation Center, particularly when he denounced the Iraq war and noted that he had opposed it from the outset.
Repeatedly, he referred to the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high speed chase. Fifty-five people died and 2,000 were injured in several days of riots in the city's black neighborhoods.
"Those 'quiet riots' that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths," Obama said. "They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better."
He argued that once a hurricane hits or a jury renders a not guilty verdict, "the frustration is there for all to see."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=3246610
Given the recent interest in racial politics in the last few days, I wonder if Rev. Jeremiah Wright helped to script that speech.
Click my post title for my Blog posts from last June - when McCain was 'toast.'
3 comments:
Found your blog via the Politico, and it appears you are somewhat troubled, but not hopelessly so. Full disclosure as to the justification for my coming "angry rant;" I'm a young black professional male working in Washington. Coincidentally, I also attended Hampton University but I was not at this speech.
I actually welcome a debate with McCain. I like McCain and truly think he's a straight talker and might be good for the country despite his health conditions.
However, your race-baiting and false logic is trite. For anyone living in America in 2008 to not comprehend the legacy of the issues addressed in today's speech speaks more to your own solipism than to the reality of race relations in this country. "Callow"? "Divisive"? Surely you can't be serious.
I wouldn't expect a race war... moreso, a generational war. Either you're a dinosaur or horribly out of touch with modern society.
Oh, and by-the-way, that photograph is a Photoshopped fake. Please examine the crisp original.
Trite race baiting would do the least harm, I would imagine.
God Bless the work, Jonathon! You are going to have lots of it.
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