The Real Speech on Race

You might have remembered President Obama's much-heralded speech on race in 2008, which supposedly condemned the racist and anti-American views of his pastor of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  (Oddly enough, what's not remembered about that speech is that Obama tacitly agreed with Wright that the American Founding was racist and low; Obama's only disagreement with Wright came in the idea that American has changed for the better since those times and has transcended our racist past.)  Obama's real speech on race, however, has just been uncovered by The Daily Caller, and elicits, probably, Obama's truer views on the subject of race and America.  Here is the speech in question which Obama gave in 2007 at Hampton University:

And as you might guess, the Right has pounced on it while the MSM has given it no airtime whatsoever.  In the speech then-Senator Obama riles up the mostly black crowd, letting them know that, like Kanye West said, the Bush Administration just didn't care that much about black people during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” Obama shouts in the video, which was shot in June of 2007 at Hampton University in Virginia. By contrast, survivors of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Andrew received generous amounts of aid, Obama explains. The reason? Unlike residents of majority-black New Orleans, the federal government considers those victims “part of the American family.”

And more:

The spine of Obama’s speech is a parable about a pregnant woman shot in the stomach during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The baby is born with a bullet in her arm, which doctors successfully remove. That bullet, Obama explains, is a metaphor for the problems facing black America, namely racism. (At a similar speech he gave in April of 2007 at the First AME Church in Los Angeles to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the riots, according to a church member who was there, Obama described the slug as, “the bullet of slavery and Jim Crow.”) 

At least 53 people were killed during the chaos in Los Angeles, many of them targeted by mobs because of their skin color. But Obama does not describe the riots as an expression of racism, but rather as the result of it. The burning and shooting and looting, he explains, amounted to “Los Angeles expressing a lingering, ongoing, pervasive legacy, a tragic legacy out of the tragic history of this country, a history this country has never fully come to terms with.” 

And with that, Obama pivots to his central point: The Los Angeles riots and Hurricane Katrina have racism in common. “The federal response after Katrina was similar to the response we saw after the riots in LA,” he thunders from the podium. “People in Washington, they wake up, they’re surprised: ‘There’s poverty in our midst! Folks are frustrated! Black people angry!’ Then there’s gonna be some panels, and hearings, and there are commissions and there are reports, and then there’s some aid money, although we don’t always know where it’s going — it can’t seem to get to the people who need it — and nothin’ really changes, except the news coverage quiets down and Anderson Cooper is on to something else.”

Also, a bulletin was obtained by The Daily Caller from Trinity United Church of Christ a few months after Obama's speech, and the Rev. Wright echoed the same sentiments Obama expressed, saying the following:

“The response of the United States government to the Blacks who were drowning in Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina was a response informed by hatred,” Wright wrote in the April 2006 the church’s newsletter. “We still see hatred. Kanye West was right! If this government really cared about Black Africans, the response would be far more than the deafening silence that we hear today.”

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.