Pajamas Media: 'Barack, I Didn’t Do It for This': An Homage to Andrew Goodman
Also, being very disturbed by the equivalence Obama drew between Wright and his grandmother, and hearing that he had used the same anecdote about her in his first book, I decided to look it up. It's not exactly the same scenario as he described in his speech.
I took her into the other room and asked her what had happened.
"A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus."
"That's all?"
Her lips pursed with irritation. "He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn't come, I think he might have hit me over the head."
I returned to the kitchen. Gramps was rinsing his cup, his back turned to me. "Listen," I said, "why don't you just let me give her a ride. She seems pretty upset."
"By a panhandler?"
"Yeah, I know--but it's probably a little scary for her, seeing some big man block her way. It's really no big deal."
He turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. "It is a big deal. It's a big deal to me... Before you came in, she told me the fellow was black." He whispered the word. "That's the real reason she's bothered. And I just don't think that's right."
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 88.
How is this equivalent to Rev. Wright's continuing to instill racial hatred and anti-semitism into his congregation, claiming, for example, that whites created the AIDS virus to commit genocide against blacks? This anecdote deals with an elderly couple who find their own residual racism regrettable and seek to disavow it, even trembling at the wrongness of it. Does Wright?
There's nothing in this story about just a general fear of black men walking down the street.
I'm sorry, but I lost a lot of respect for Obama over this.
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