The Untrained Ear

Shelby Steele’s insightful and incisive piece on Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal as a “bargainer” candidate — a candidate who offers whites racial innocence, and blacks the opportunity to “document the end of inferiority” — bears reading. One of the corollaries to the “bargainer” concept that Steele discusses is the power, and [...]

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Barack Obama’s March 18 speech on race relations in the United States (note that I deliberately did not characterize it as a “speech explaining his voluntary choice of the Trinity Church, and Jeremiah Wright as the pastor, for himself, his wife and his daughters,” because that wasn’t in fact what the speech was about), should, [...]

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So here’s Barack Obama’s first major written statement on his relationship with his pastor, Jeremiah Wright — and remember, the issue here is not Jeremiah Wright’s statements themselves (though it is easy to see why people would be outraged by them), but rather Barack Obama’s voluntary 20-year relationship with Wright.
While many others were ooo-ing and [...]

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