Obama has won the nomination

[Shawnee123]

That's what I see: all smooth but never really saying anything.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

That's what I see: all smooth but never really saying anything.

I read the transcript before I saw any clips of the speech. I can understand you saying you disagreed with what he said, I can understand you saying you didn't believe what was said or didn't believe that he meant what he said. I do not, however, believe that anyone can argue that 'nothing was said'.

I am undecided at this time, but that speech was the most concise appraisal of the current state of race relations in this country I have read in a while. It is fortunate that it is during an election, because it has received an audience that it would have lost if it had been given from a pulpit or on C-SPAN. After I read the speech, I saw a 10 second clip of Obama giving it. For all that he is considered a good speaker, I think his delivery did not live up to the words because the words were that good. It really is one of the better contemporary speeches I have read in a very long time.

I can understand your not liking it, but even many of his critics admit that it was a good speech. Consider where we are right now, the largest prison nation in the world. Our current president has done nothing to address this. Reading his speech, I can see that at least he articulates the issue instead of ignoring it like every other candidate.

If you didn't see anything, then you must have been keeping your eyes closed.

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.

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.