Rev. Wright's Teaching Moment

It was a hell of a speech, but Rev. Wright really hit me when he contrasted the Fla. A&M band to the Mich and the Mich State bands.  I saw the FAMU band at "Gator Growl" when I was at law school at U Fla in the early 80s.  As someone who was accustomed to marching bands from universities like Notre Dame, Mich, and Mich State, it was a real eye-opener.  

My daughter marches in the band for a Catholic HS in Ft. Laud.  The band, like the school, is largely white, and they are like the kind of band that Rev. Wright described.  They play their share of largely black public HS's, and those bands are similar to FAMU's.  Rev. Wright is correct, the 2 styles of bands are different, but neither one is deficient.

Like it or not, Obama brings Rev. Wright along w/ him, and, like it or not, Rev. Wright is bringing decades (if not centuries) of racial demons out of the closet and into this year's prez campaign.  Once and for all, this speech shows that this campaign is about a lot more than the respective ambitions of 3 senators.  It is about even more than Iraq, the economy, and health care, as critical as those issues are.  This campaign is going to be about who and what we are as a country.

Part of me wishes that it hadn't happened.  I would prefer to see this campaign contested over Iraq, gasoline prices, and whether people effectively want a 3d term for W.  Like the Kennedy bros in the early 60's, let racial issues stay on the periphery until later.

That cat is now out the bag for good.  The fierce urgency of now is that our nation has far too many unresolved racial issues, and they would inevitably end up on the table when our nation's first serious AA candidate moved towards the nomination.  We might as well start confronting them now.

Rev. Wright isn't the issue here--he's a stalking horse for something much bigger.  We have 400 years of history, and we've only resolved half of it at best.  After starting to confront it head-on from roughly the mid-50's to the mid-70's, we've spent the next 3 decades essentially sweeping them under the rug.  That rug is now being pulled up.

If I were in the Clinton camp, I'd be very concerned tonight.  The AA vote is now foreclosed for her for good.  She cannot get elected w/o a huge AA vote in the fall, and tonight made it clear to me that she will never get that vote.

As to Obama, I think that the timing of his appearance on Faux today was more than coincidental.  His interview w/ Wallace was his latest attempt to walk a narrow tightrope.  He has to function in 2 very different worlds, and Wright's speech and the Faux interview showed that fact.

In closing, I must note how bright and how compelling a speaker Wright is.  I wish that the priests at my parish could be half as compelling.  Meanwhile, Rick Sanchez has a fire to report, which is much more his speed....

UPDATE:  Neither Durbin nor W-S actually, um, watched the speech, yet they're on as surrogates?  WTF?