Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008
WASHINGTON — With controversy over his pastor's racially divisive sermons threatening his presidential campaign, Barack Obama tackled race in America head-on Tuesday in a defining speech that drew instant comparisons to John F. Kennedy's 1960 address about his once-controversial Catholicism.
Obama, speaking in Philadelphia, called slavery America's "original sin" and said mistrust between blacks and whites goes both ways. He said that racial resentments have long shaped the nation's political landscape, but that he thinks the nation is changing and that he could help heal the divide if elected.
After campaigning for more than a year as an African-American who transcends race rather than lets it define his politics, Obama had no choice but to embrace the subject. Race has surged recently into prominence as a campaign issue, and Democratic voters in some states, especially those with histories of racial division, show increasing signs of voting along racial lines.
"I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork," Obama said, referring to the firestorm that erupted over racial remarks by his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now."
Wright, who is retiring as pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, drew fire in recent days after TV and the Internet played up some of his past radical statements angrily condemning America for its racism, among other things.
Obama said that while he condemns Wright's controversial statements, "that isn't all that I know of the man. ...He has been like family to me. ... I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."
Nor, Obama said, would he disown his own white grandmother, who loved and helped raise him but "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Obama, whose oratorical gifts lifted him to national prominence, also referred to his rivals, Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and John McCain, R-Ariz., in the context of race and the presidential campaign.
He noted the recent comments by Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, who said that Obama had an unfair advantage because he's black.
"We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies," Obama said. "Or at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.'"
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