A story I was told in history class:

During the Kennedy
administration, when the civil rights marches were just getting
started, Bobby Kennedy went south to meet with black civil rights
leaders. He was to convey to them that the Kennedy administration
wanted to help but ask if they tone down their rhetoric and marches
because they were making the US look bad and there was a cold war on.

Black
leaders responded angrily and made a lot of anti-American statements,
saying why should they care about America's image in the world. It
wasn't their country anyway.

Bobby Kennedy -- a true blue patriot -- left the meeting and went back to Washington, mad as hell.

But
reportedly, a couple weeks later, he called one of his senior aides
into his office and said something to the effect of, you know, if I'd
been treated the way they have, I might feel the same way about this
country.

From then on, the Kennedy administration fully supported the civil rights movement.

In
regards to Jeremiah Wright and Michelle Obama's comments, I think we
should trust the American people to be just as fair minded.

The
truth is that most of them haven't thought about this from the other
side. Like Bobby at that time, they've just not put themselves in the
other person's shoes.

We need to remind the American people
that America first enslaved blacks and then forced them to live under a
descriminitory set of laws and the unbridled rule of lynch mobs.

Even
President George Bush recently said, in regard to whites in the south
hanging nooses out of their trucks, people need to remember what blacks
have been through.

And we need to ask all those people, given
that history, how would they feel about a country that had treated them
that way or their relatives -- many still alive to remember it -- that
way?

Would the fact that the country had finally stopped
treating your people badly but only after being repeatedly pushed to do
so, assuage you? Would you look upon 30 years of affirmative action as
enough to make up for 400 years of oppression -- oppression witnessed
by a generation of people still alive today?

I personally am
not surprised by the notion that there's a fair amount of anti-American
feeling in some quarters of the black community, but I sense that most
Americans of African descent WANT to believe in this country. There's a
desire to love America and be proud of it, but there's the fear that
America maybe won't return the favor.

If Obama is elected
doesn't it say, more powerfully than anything else could, that those
fears are unwarrented and that Americans of African descent can rest
assured that they are full members of this country. Does it not offer
the potential to change once and for all how Americans of African
descent feel about America? It has already apparently changed how
Michelle Obama feels. What is the impact for our country if that change
in feeling becomes universal? If you're concerned about the lack of
patriotism of people like Jeremiah Wright and other cynics who say
America is a racist nation, isn't the best response to show him he's
wrong about the country?

You don't have to do that by
necessarily electing Obama president, but you do have to do it by
giving Obama a fair shake and by being understanding of the history
that blacks have faced and the necessary attitudinal consequences of
that which make it impossible for a black politician not to know and
even be friends with someone of Wright's views regarding America.

The
trouble is that this may not be an argument that a black person can
make to whites as successfully as another white could make it to
whites. Maybe someone like Senator Byrd or someone a little more
conservative, who has credibility with more conservative elements of
the white population?