Obama delivers blunt, risky speech on race

PHILADELPHIA — Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday confronted the nation's divisions between black and white as he sought to dispel the furor over inflammatory statements by his former pastor.

The speech — the most sweeping discussion of race in a presidential campaign in memory — was an attempt to broaden the focus from Obama's immediate political problem to the collective problem of America's struggle with racial issues.

Obama, D-Ill., again condemned the more incendiary remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But, drawing on his experiences as the son of a white mother and a black father, Obama also tried to explain to white voters the anger and frustration behind Wright's words and to urge blacks to understand the sources of the racial fears and resentments among whites.

He called slavery America's "original sin" and said mistrust between blacks and whites goes both ways.

Analysts said it was risky for Obama to take on race in such a direct way, though he was forced to because Wright's rhetoric represented a potentially lethal threat to a candidacy premised on change and unity.

While his immediate political goal was to tamp down any doubts that his association with Wright has caused among voters as he battles for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama also sought to link his theme of understanding and reconciliation to more concrete issues.

"The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through, a part of our union that we have yet to perfect," he said.

"And if we walk away now ... we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American."

After running a campaign that in many ways tried not to be defined by race, Obama placed himself in the middle of the debate over how to address it, a living bridge between whites and blacks divided by the legacy of slavery and all that came after it.

"It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years," Obama said. "Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy, particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own."

For Obama, who is engaged in an intense fight for his party's nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 37-minute speech ahead of Pennsylvania's April 22 primary was an attempt to realign his campaign after a turbulent two weeks.

Images of Wright, 66, who retired last month as pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, replayed again and again on television, threatened to damage a coalition of black and white voters that Obama has been trying to forge.

It remains an open question whether the images of the pastor will fall to the side and allow Obama's campaign message to regain its prominence. This speech was a political risk, his advisers said, whose wisdom may not be fully known for months.

"It was very dicey at a time when race is misunderstood by some and overplayed by others," said L. Douglas Wilder, the mayor of Richmond, Va., who was the nation's first elected black governor. "It was a very, very difficult subject to bring up. It had to be approached in a way that was really something of substance."

Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst in Washington, said the speech was powerful but might not put the Wright issue behind Obama.

"The problem is that people don't know much about Barack Obama except that he wants to bring us together and he doesn't like the old politics," Rothenberg said. "It's still a question of judgment. Who is he? What does he believe? Who does he listen to and how does he weigh what they say?"

Wright's views "denigrate the greatness and goodness of our nation" and are offensive to people of all races, Obama said, but he added that he could not disown the man, who is "like family."

"I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe," he said.

Wright brought him to his Christian faith, married him, baptized his daughters and taught him the faith's imperative to "love one another," Obama said.

He said the preacher was more complicated than what he called the media's caricature. He noted Wright was a Marine who ministered to the homeless, needy and sick.

But Wright also has said the U.S. government unleashed the AIDS virus and crack cocaine to kill black people. A corrupt foreign policy invited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the preacher has said. He has called this nation the "U.S. of KKKA."

In his speech, Obama publicly acknowledged for the first time that he had heard some "controversial" remarks from Wright while Obama was in church, though he did not offer details or his reaction. Obama previously said he had not heard the most inflammatory of Wright's remarks.

The speech, delivered before local supporters, elected officials and clergy members at the National Constitution Center, was broadcast live on cable. His words were directed at a variety of constituencies, including the superdelegates who, it seems likely, will decide the nominating battle, and white voters in states such as Pennsylvania that could be vital in the primary and in the general elections.

Obama portrayed arguments over race as a distraction. "We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism," Obama said. "We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the O.J. trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina, or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election." If that happens, Obama said, "nothing will change."

Obama noted the recent comments by Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, who said Obama had an unfair advantage because he's black.

"We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain," Obama said. "Or at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.' "

A few hours after the speech, Clinton arrived at Philadelphia's City Hall for a campaign stop. She said she had not seen the speech but that she was "very glad" that Obama had made it, given that race had been a complicated issue in America marked by "pitfalls" and "detours."

In the speech, Obama noted that his candidacy had been successful in predominantly white states and in predominantly black states, but he conceded the nation's racial divisions remained ingrained and black anger and white resentment was rarely interchangeably understood.

"For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years," Obama said. "That anger may not get expressed in public ... but it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table.

"In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community."

Later, he added: "So when [white people] are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

Obama said the biggest mistake Wright made in his condemnations of the United States was in not acknowledging progress. He offered himself as an example.

"I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners, an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters," Obama said. "I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

Material from The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and McClatchy Newspapers is included in this report.