What Obama Should Have Said

LA Times Blowback:

In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would
say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely
"explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so
doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us
a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated
the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain't what it used
to be in America.He should have presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes
and a road map for new thinking about race. He should have depicted his
minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional
angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of
color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look
on our neighbors' skin color no differently than how we look on their eye
color.In fact, I'd say that considering the nation's undivided attention to this
all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of
racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.