Is Obama some anti-American black separatist? That will certainly be
the suspicion among most Americans, the uneducated white blue-collar
voters as well as deep south whites. After flag-pin-gate, Muslim
smears, Farrakahn smears, Michelle Obama's "proud" remarks, no hand on
heart smear, his middle name... and just wait till they play that
Wright sermon in a commercial right before the election. It will be
Sista-Souljah times 10000000.



But if anyone actually took the time to read Obama's book they would
think 'here is finally a president who deeply understands the problems
and complexity concerning race and its relation to poverty. (Obama has
even talked about rolling back affirmative action and supports class
based affirmative action, and not race based affirmative action,
something that MLK also supported) No leader should expect to lead our
country into post-poverty or post-racial times if they don't have the
proper understanding of the problems of race. I applaud Bush for
denouncing the noose and denouncing using the word "lynching" lightly,
and it was admirable him for turning attention to Africa and AIDS. But
as Katrina came and left, there was a long window of opportunity to
begin a social experiment to tackle and address the problem of race and
poverty, yet the experiment of constructing a Jeffersonian democracy in
the Middle East would be the only priority for this administration, and
the people of Katrina were left with FEMA and formaldehyde laced
trailers.



Anyhow, before the media repeatedly starts AGAIN asking the stupid
question, "wait a minute, well WHO is Barack Obama? and WHAT are his
views" I would implore them to read his books and you'll see his views on race, and his views certainly do not reflect black grievance, like those of his pastor, but admiration
in the fact that "people can change" as he said in the South Carolina
CNN debate when asked, "Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black
president?"


Read an excerpt from a NYT book review, including a beautiful passage from Obama's book:

The Audacity of Hope hews closely to formula. Each of its nine chapters—on broad, thematic subjects like politics, opportunity, faith, race, and family—begins with an anecdote that suggests the point he wants to make about the subject, then moves on to his ruminations about it, and ends with another anecdote meant to drive the point home. These can tend toward the homiletic (the chapter on faith ends with the sentence "I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven"). Most unusually for an American politician, though, he has a sense of historical irony—and is willing to articulate it. After being sworn in to the Senate he listens to a stirring speech of welcome by Senator Robert Byrd, who warns of the "dangerous encroachment, year after year, of the Executive Branch on the Senate's precious independence." "Listening to Senator Byrd," he reflects:

" I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation.

I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining. I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate,whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding : the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain."