Enlighten yourself and see the truth before passing judgment on false pretences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvMbeVQj6Lw

If you watch these videos, you will see that Rev. Wright is a God loving Christian. He is not the person that the media has portrayed. Please share the TRUTH!

I would think that if you were a journalist, you would like to have some creditability behind your name. To all those incompetent journalists reporting false information, please do your homework! It wasn’t very hard to find the truth.

Hey, what do we expect black people to do other than than to accept conspiracy theories about AIDS, Crack and the CIA, or support Palestinian terrorsts such as Hamas, or to pledge solidarity with Momar Qaddafi after the Pan-AM 103 disaster, or to compare U.S. troops in Iraq to Al-qaeda terrorists. After all, there was Tuskegee a century ago.

You know that everything that Wright stands for is crap, and there are millions of black Americans who don’t buy into it, so why the excuses for him?

In some ways, if liberals can’t see how far America has come, conservatives want to believe race and racism just don’t exist, it’s all just something in the distant past.

And really, those are the pitfalls of each political philosophy in general, not just on the issue of race. This is what leads to conservatives viewing liberals as America haters, and what leads liberals to either state or imply that conservatives are heartless, uncaring monsters.

I think it’s important to view it in that context; conservatism isn’t actually an ideology, it’s an anti-ideology which forces one to accept that there’s no utopia. Sometimes, of course, people take that too far and use it as an excuse for inaction, but still, it isn’t about whether one cares about a problem like racism, it’s about whether or not one believes that there is an action (particularly a govt action or policy) which could really help. Conservatives tend to believe that the society has to fix problems like this from the grassroots level, not by top down governance. In fact, part of our issue with racial politics is that we very much believe that many of the govt policies have created some of the current problems or greatly exacerbated them. Obama (to his credit) mentioned this in his speech.

But then let me ask Goldberg and others like him this: what is the conservative answer to racial issues? Do you all have an urban agenda that will help poor young blacks, who don’t see a way out of their destructive lives, huh?

I don’t know if I’d consider myself an ‘other who is like Goldberg’ but I can only attempt to give my response to that as someone who has a generally conservative outlook but isn’t wedded to a completely libertarian type of hands off, ultrasmall govt philosophy.

And of course, it’s an extremely difficult and complex problem so I don’t pretend to have all of the answers- by a long shot.

Generally though I think most of the solutions do have to begin in the community, and I think we make the mistake of addressing these things nationally (though of course, national dialogue to share what works in one locale makes a lot of sense.) I think we’ve failed to hold our municipal govts accountable for an awful lot, and change needs to start there. Zoning, enterprise zones, urban redevelopment, drug laws and enforcement that make more sense, continuing welfare/workfare reform, education, you name it.

That’s the governmental part, and then of course there’s the organic change from the community itself (and like most conservatives, I appreciate and applaud that current of black responsibility that seems to be growing.)

Which leads into my next point:

The black church has long been a place where blacks could feel good about themselves in a society that didn’t allow them to feel good about being black. As a kid, I remember our church singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during Black History Month. We would have services where we would remember important events in African American History. While Trinity goes overboard in my opinion, it is part of a tradition of having people feel good about being black. That isn’t the sign of a racist church. A very liberal church, yes, but not a racist one.

Don’t you think though that there’s a pretty bright, clear line there, between promoting positive views of black culture vs. negative views about white culture? That appears to me to be the line that Trinity and other churches like it cross.