Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Message to the People on Obamania

We haven't blogged on Barack in awhile. Sorry.

So to catch up let's offer a perspective from one of Louisville's few public intellectuals. In this week's LEO, U of L professor and Pan-African Studies chair, Dr. Ricky L. Jones dropped his monthly column, 'Message to the People' addressing Barack's speech and the inevitable relationship to race in this historic campaign:

"Barack Obama’s March 18 speech in Philadelphia on race was inevitable. Try as he might, there was no way he could complete his presidential bid without facing the beast at some point. After video of controversial comments by his longtime Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, were repeated ad nauseam by almost every major media outlet, Obama was forced into an almost impossible damage control balancing act.

He had to distance himself from Wright’s words without “rejecting and denouncing” his minister, as he did Louis Farrakhan in Ohio weeks earlier. He couldn’t completely and unapologetically pull Wright to his bosom, because many in white America wouldn’t accept it. Neither could he simply throw his pastor and mentor under the bus, because highly religious black America would then label him a political opportunist and turncoat."

For the rest, go here.

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