The controversy surrounding sermons by Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright have been discussed throughout the web and blogosphere. Thanks to those who seek the truth and YouTube one can see the entire Wright sermon in context where he is quoting a U.S. Ambassador who says after 9/11 that chickens have come home to roost. The controversy reached such heights due to media networks such as the right-wing Fox News whose repeated unobjective examination of the clips of Wright fueled the fire. Obama’s speech on race was at first hailed by the media as the beginning as an honest dialogue on race. A couple of weeks later the speech is now becoming marginalized caught up in the next spin cycle.
The truth is Americans can not have an honest dialogue about race because most Ameicans are ignorant of true American history and the history of western civilization of the last 500 years. From the genocide of Native Americans who were already on this land, to importation of human beings from Africa for free labor to build the wealth of the United States, to the colonization of those who remained in Africa to build the wealth of Europe. The colonizaition of India, the brutal colonization of Australia where have Europeans gone that has not brought death and destruction to the people already there (wherever there is)? This is the perspective from which Jermiah Wright speaks. A perspective given the above that it would not be far fetched, it would not be a leap to wonder whether HIV/AIDS was laboratory created, a weapon, or a tool for population control.
Obama received praise in his speech in part for acknowledging white resentment it was a sort of “thanks for saying it. We have been thinking it.” Obama acknowledges white Americans who have seen no benefit in the privilige of being white of having given up their culture in pursuit of whiteness in America and have little to show for it three generations later. These are some of those who decry black cultural events and ceremonies and argue why aren’t there white cultural events, completely blind and ambivalent to the whiteness that surrounds them 24/7 365.
How does one have a conversation on race when significant number of white Americans see no privilege in being white. A Chris Rock joke comes to mind. Chris Rock famously stated, that not one white person in here would trade places with me and I’m rich. That’s how good it is to be white in America. Where do we begin…
