May 03 2008

The Politics of the Rev. Wright Controversy: A Debate with Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Adolph Reed,

The following debate between Adolph Reed, Jr. and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Democracy Now! is linked to here.  For those of you with about 120 megabytes of room on your hard drives, and have the mpeg 4 codec, you can download it here.  Reed thinks Barack Obama is incapable of getting elected to the presidency, on the grounds that he is a phony who won’t be able to withstand the inevitable Republican Noise Machine (though he thinks Hillary Clinton won’t be able to, either, for the same reason).  Harris-Lacewell takes the opposing point of view.

The debate begins exactly twenty-one minutes into the program, so if you’re impatient to get to the discussion that’s the point at which you’ll want to start.  I think this is a fascinating debate, and I wish we could see its like on the mainstream news channels such as MSNBC and CNN.  I posted the transcript of the debate at my forum, if you’d like to read it.

2 comments

  1. I am finding this whole Wright, Obama, Hillary  bubble up very interesting … and frightening for the November prospects.  !!

    And thanks for reminding me.  I want to go to Black Agenda Report and see what Glen Ford has to say.

  2. editor Glen Ford writes that Barack Obama’s decision to try to run a “race neutral” campaign was doomed to troubles from the outset:

    Barack Obama’s strategy to win the White House was to run a “race-neutral” campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race. The very premise – that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy – demanded the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty. From the moment Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is no white America, there is no Black America,” it was inevitable that the candidate would one day declare the vast body of Black opinion illegitimate.

    That day came on Tuesday, April 29, when a battered and (truly) bitter Barack Obama made his final, irrevocable break with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose televised Black Liberation Theology tour de force the preceding Friday, Sunday and Monday had laid bare the contradictions of Obama’s hopeless racial “neutrality.” It was the masterful preacher and seasoned political creature Wright – not the racists who had endlessly looped chopped snippets of the reverend’s past sermons together in an attempt to make him appear crazed – who forced Obama to choose in the push and pull of Black and white American worldviews. Obama was made to register his preference for the white racist version of truth over Rev. Wright’s, whose rejection of Euro-American mythology reflects prevailing African American perceptions, past and present.

    “Rev. Jeremiah Wright laid bare the contradictions of Obama’s hopeless racial ‘neutrality.'”

    Find the enrire article:

    here

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