This is been going around the internet. Worth the read. There is also a Utube of him reading the speech.

Date:   3/20/2008 11:52:39 PM ( 16 y ago)

March 18, 2008
TRANSCRIPT


Barack Obama's Speech on Race



The following is the text as prepared for
delivery of Senator Barack Obama's speech on
race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall
that still stands across the street, a group of
men gathered and, with these simple words,
launched America's improbable experiment in
democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and
patriots who had traveled across an ocean to
escape tyranny and persecution finally made real
their declaration of independence at a
Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed
but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by
this nation's original sin of slavery, a
question that divided the colonies and brought
the convention to a stalemate until the founders
chose to allow the slave trade to continue for
at least twenty more years, and to leave any
final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question
was already embedded within our Constitution - a
Constitution that had at is very core the ideal
of equal citizenship under the law; a
Constitution that promised its people liberty,
and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough
to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men
and women of every color and creed their full
rights and obligations as citizens of the United
States. What would be needed were Americans in
successive generations who were willing to do
their part - through protests and struggle, on
the streets and in the courts, through a civil
war and civil disobedience and always at great
risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of
our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the
beginning of this campaign - to continue the
long march of those who came before us, a march
for a more just, more equal, more free, more
caring and more prosperous America. I chose to
run for the presidency at this moment in history
because I believe deeply that we cannot solve
the challenges of our time unless we solve them
together - unless we perfect our union by
understanding that we may have different
stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may
not look the same and we may not have come from
the same place, but we all want to move in the
same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in
the decency and generosity of the American
people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a
white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the
help of a white grandfather who survived a
Depression to serve in Patton's Army during
World War II and a white grandmother who worked
on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth
while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the
best schools in America and lived in one of the
world's poorest nations. I am married to a black
American who carries within her the blood of
slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass
on to our two precious daughters. I have
brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and
cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered
across three continents, and for as long as I
live, I will never forget that in no other
country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most
conventional candidate. But it is a story that
has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that
this nation is more than the sum of its parts -
that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign,
against all predictions to the contrary, we saw
how hungry the American people were for this
message of unity. Despite the temptation to view
my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we
won commanding victories in states with some of
the whitest populations in the country. In South
Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still
flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an
issue in the campaign. At various stages in the
campaign, some commentators have deemed me
either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw
racial tensions bubble to the surface during the
week before the South Carolina primary. The
press has scoured every exit poll for the latest
evidence of racial polarization, not just in
terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of
weeks that the discussion of race in this
campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the
implication that my candidacy is somehow an
exercise in affirmative action; that it's based
solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to
purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On
the other end, we've heard my former pastor,
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary
language to express views that have the
potential not only to widen the racial divide,
but views that denigrate both the greatness and
the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms,
the statements of Reverend Wright that have
caused such controversy. For some, nagging
questions remain. Did I know him to be an
occasionally fierce critic of American domestic
and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear
him make remarks that could be considered
controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I
strongly disagree with many of his political
views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you
have heard remarks from your pastors, priests,
or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent
firestorm weren't simply controversial. They
weren't simply a religious leader's effort to
speak out against perceived injustice. Instead,
they expressed a profoundly distorted view of
this country - a view that sees white racism as
endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with
America above all that we know is right with
America; a view that sees the conflicts in the
Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions
of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of
emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not
only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when
we need unity; racially charged at a time when
we need to come together to solve a set of
monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist
threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care
crisis and potentially devastating climate
change; problems that are neither black or white
or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my
professed values and ideals, there will no doubt
be those for whom my statements of condemnation
are not enough. Why associate myself with
Reverend Wright in the first place, they may
ask? Why not join another church? And I confess
that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were
the snippets of those sermons that have run in
an endless loop on the television and You Tube,
or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed
to the caricatures being peddled by some
commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of
the man. The man I met more than twenty years
ago is a man who helped introduce me to my
Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our
obligations to love one another; to care for the
sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who
served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has
studied and lectured at some of the finest
universities and seminaries in the country, and
who for over thirty years led a church that
serves the community by doing God's work here on
Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to
the needy, providing day care services and
scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching
out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I
described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats
and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying
the reverend's voice up into the rafters..And in
that single note - hope! - I heard something
else; at the foot of that cross, inside the
thousands of churches across the city, I
imagined the stories of ordinary black people
merging with the stories of David and Goliath,
Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's
den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories
- of survival, and freedom, and hope - became
our story, my story; the blood that had spilled
was our blood, the tears our tears; until this
black church, on this bright day, seemed once
more a vessel carrying the story of a people
into future generations and into a larger world.
Our trials and triumphs became at once unique
and universal, black and more than black; in
chronicling our journey, the stories and songs
gave us a means to reclaim memories that we
didn't need to feel shame about.memories that
all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like
other predominantly black churches across the
country, Trinity embodies the black community in
its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom,
the model student and the former gang-banger.
Like other black churches, Trinity's services
are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy
humor. They are full of dancing, clapping,
screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to
the untrained ear. The church contains in full
the kindness and cruelty, the fierce
intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the
struggles and successes, the love and yes, the
bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship
with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be,
he has been like family to me. He strengthened
my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my
children. Not once in my conversations with him
have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in
derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he
interacted with anything but courtesy and
respect. He contains within him the
contradictions - the good and the bad - of the
community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the
black community. I can no more disown him than I
can my white grandmother - a woman who helped
raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again
for me, a woman who loves me as much as she
loves anything in this world, but a woman 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.

These people are a part of me. And they are a
part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or
excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I
can assure you it is not. I suppose the
politically safe thing would be to move on from
this episode and just hope that it fades into
the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as
a crank or a demagogue, just as some have
dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of
her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation
cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be
making the same mistake that Reverend Wright
made in his offending sermons about America - to
simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative
to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been
made and the issues that have surfaced over the
last few weeks reflect the complexities of race
in this country that we've never really worked
through - a part of our union that we have yet
to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we
simply retreat into our respective corners, we
will never be able to come together and solve
challenges like health care, or education, or
the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder
of how we arrived at this point. As William
Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and
buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not
need to recite here the history of racial
injustice in this country. But we do need to
remind ourselves that so many of the disparities
that exist in the African-American community
today can be directly traced to inequalities
passed on from an earlier generation that
suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior
schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty
years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the
inferior education they provided, then and now,
helps explain the pervasive achievement gap
between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were
prevented, often through violence, from owning
property, or loans were not granted to
African-American business owners, or black
homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or
blacks were excluded from unions, or the police
force, or fire departments - meant that black
families could not amass any meaningful wealth
to bequeath to future generations. That history
helps explain the wealth and income gap between
black and white, and the concentrated pockets of
poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men,
and the shame and frustration that came from not
being able to provide for one's family,
contributed to the erosion of black families - a
problem that welfare policies for many years may
have worsened. And the lack of basic services in
so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for
kids to play in, police walking the beat,
regular garbage pick-up and building code
enforcement - all helped create a cycle of
violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and
other African-Americans of his generation grew
up. They came of age in the late fifties and
early sixties, a time when segregation was still
the law of the land and opportunity was
systematically constricted. What's remarkable is
not how many failed in the face of
discrimination, but rather how many men and
women overcame the odds; how many were able to
make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their
way to get a piece of the American Dream, there
were many who didn't make it - those who were
ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by
discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed
on to future generations - those young men and
increasingly young women who we see standing on
street corners or languishing in our prisons,
without hope or prospects for the future. Even
for those blacks who did make it, questions of
race, and racism, continue to define their
worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and
women of Reverend Wright's generation, the
memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have
not gone away; nor has the anger and the
bitterness of those years. That anger may not
get expressed in public, in front of white
co-workers or white friends. But it does find
voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen
table. At times, that anger is exploited by
politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines,
or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on
Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.
The fact that so many people are surprised to
hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's
sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that
the most segregated hour in American life occurs
on Sunday morning. That anger is not always
productive; indeed, all too often it distracts
attention from solving real problems; it keeps
us from squarely facing our own complicity in
our condition, and prevents the African-American
community from forging the alliances it needs to
bring about real change. But the anger is real;
it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to
condemn it without understanding its roots, only
serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments
of the white community. Most working- and
middle-class white Americans don't feel that
they have been particularly privileged by their
race. Their experience is the immigrant
experience - as far as they're concerned, no
one's handed them anything, they've built it
from scratch. They've worked hard all their
lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped
overseas or their pension dumped after a
lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their
futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in
an era of stagnant wages and global competition,
opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game,
in which your dreams come at my expense. So when
they are told to bus their children to a school
across town; when they hear that an African
American is getting an advantage in landing a
good job or a spot in a good college because of
an injustice that they themselves never
committed; when they're told that their fears
about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow
prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these
resentments aren't always expressed in polite
company. But they have helped shape the
political landscape for at least a generation.
Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped
forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians
routinely exploited fears of crime for their own
electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative
commentators built entire careers unmasking
bogus claims of racism while dismissing
legitimate discussions of racial injustice and
inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved
counterproductive, so have these white
resentments distracted attention from the real
culprits of the middle class squeeze - a
corporate culture rife with inside dealing,
questionable accounting practices, and
short-term greed; a Washington dominated by
lobbyists and special interests; economic
policies that favor the few over the many. And
yet, to wish away the resentments of white
Americans, to label them as misguided or even
racist, without recognizing they are grounded in
legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial
divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial
stalemate we've been stuck in for years.
Contrary to the claims of some of my critics,
black and white, I have never been so naïve as
to believe that we can get beyond our racial
divisions in a single election cycle, or with a
single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a
conviction rooted in my faith in God and my
faith in the American people - that working
together we can move beyond some of our old
racial wounds, and that in fact we have no
choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path
means embracing the burdens of our past without
becoming victims of our past. It means
continuing to insist on a full measure of
justice in every aspect of American life. But it
also means binding our particular grievances -
for better health care, and better schools, and
better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all
Americans -- the white woman struggling to break
the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid
off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.
And it means taking full responsibility for own
lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and
spending more time with our children, and
reading to them, and teaching them that while
they may face challenges and discrimination in
their own lives, they must never succumb to
despair or cynicism; they must always believe
that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American - and
yes, conservative - notion of self-help found
frequent expression in Reverend Wright's
sermons. But what my former pastor too often
failed to understand is that embarking on a
program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's
sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our
society. It's that he spoke as if our society
was static; as if no progress has been made; as
if this country - a country that has made it
possible for one of his own members to run for
the highest office in the land and build a
coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian,
rich and poor, young and old -- is still
irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we
know -- what we have seen - is that America can
change. That is true genius of this nation. What
we have already achieved gives us hope - the
audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more
perfect union means acknowledging that what ails
the African-American community does not just
exist in the minds of black people; that the
legacy of discrimination - and current incidents
of discrimination, while less overt than in the
past - are real and must be addressed. Not just
with words, but with deeds - by investing in our
schools and our communities; by enforcing our
civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our
criminal justice system; by providing this
generation with ladders of opportunity that were
unavailable for previous generations. It
requires all Americans to realize that your
dreams do not have to come at the expense of my
dreams; that investing in the health, welfare,
and education of black and brown and white
children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing
more, and nothing less, than what all the
world's great religions demand - that we do unto
others as we would have them do unto us. Let us
be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let
us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that
common stake we all have in one another, and let
our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can
accept a politics that breeds division, and
conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only
as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in
the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath
of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news.
We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every
channel, every day and talk about them from now
until the election, and make the only question
in this campaign whether or not the American
people think that I somehow believe or
sympathize with his most offensive words. 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.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next
election, we'll be talking about some other
distraction. And then another one. And then
another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this
election, we can come together and say, "Not
this time." This time we want to talk about the
crumbling schools that are stealing the future
of black children and white children and Asian
children and Hispanic children and Native
American children. This time we want to reject
the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't
learn; that those kids who don't look like us
are somebody else's problem. The children of
America are not those kids, they are our kids,
and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in
the Emergency Room are filled with whites and
blacks and Hispanics who do not have health
care; who don't have the power on their own to
overcome the special interests in Washington,
but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered
mills that once provided a decent life for men
and women of every race, and the homes for sale
that once belonged to Americans from every
religion, every region, every walk of life. This
time we want to talk about the fact that the
real problem is not that someone who doesn't
look like you might take your job; it's that the
corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and
women of every color and creed who serve
together, and fight together, and bleed together
under the same proud flag. We want to talk about
how to bring them home from a war that never
should've been authorized and never should've
been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll
show our patriotism by caring for them, and
their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn't
believe with all my heart that this is what the
vast majority of Americans want for this
country. This union may never be perfect, but
generation after generation has shown that it
can always be perfected. And today, whenever I
find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about
this possibility, what gives me the most hope is
the next generation - the young people whose
attitudes and beliefs and openness to change
have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I'd like
to leave you with today - a story I told when I
had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's
birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white
woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our
campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had
been working to organize a mostly
African-American community since the beginning
of this campaign, and one day she was at a
roundtable discussion where everyone went around
telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years
old, her mother got cancer. And because she had
to miss days of work, she was let go and lost
her health care. They had to file for
bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that
she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most
expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her
mother that what she really liked and really
wanted to eat more than anything else was
mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got
better, and she told everyone at the roundtable
that the reason she joined our campaign was so
that she could help the millions of other
children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice.
Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the
source of her mother's problems were blacks who
were on welfare and too lazy to work, or
Hispanics who were coming into the country
illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies
in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes
around the room and asks everyone else why
they're supporting the campaign. They all have
different stories and reasons. Many bring up a
specific issue. And finally they come to this
elderly black man who's been sitting there
quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why
he's there. And he does not bring up a specific
issue. He does not say health care or the
economy. He does not say education or the war.
He does not say that he was there because of
Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the
room, "I am here because of Ashley."

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that
single moment of recognition between that young
white girl and that old black man is not enough.
It is not enough to give health care to the
sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union
grows stronger. And as so many generations have
come to realize over the course of the
two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of
patriots signed that document in Philadelphia,
that is where the perfection begins.

Copyright
2008 The New York Times Company
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[
NPR COMMENTARY:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88607214


Utube Speech:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-t_n_92077.html



 

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