dNa weighs in:
What people want is not for Obama to denounce Wright, but to denounce black people everywhere who have the gall to be angry at America for how they are and have been treated. What they wanted Obama to say was that racism is uneqivocally a black problem, that white people have moved past it but that black people cling to greivances as an excuse for out of wedlock births, unemployment, or incarceration.
It doesn’t matter that rhetorically and policy-wise, Obama has struck the right balance between personal and governmental responsibility. It doesn’t matter that he’s confronted black anti-Semitism, black homophobia, black apathy. When Obama dared to mention that white people might harbor irrational prejudices of their own–he was pilloried by conservatives and liberals everywhere who don’t want to feel guilty suspecting every black teenager of being a drug dealer for “throwing his grandmother under the bus.”
They didn’t want him to condemn Wright, they wanted him to condemn black people. So of course they’re not satisfied. For all the talk of how white people are attracted to Obama and the alleged “absolution” he could offer them, what they really want is for him to publicly shift the blame for the racial divide squarely on the shoulders of the black community, so white people can stop thinking about it.
And he didn’t do that, so they’re not happy.
Say word.
