clinton wins pennsylvania! 6 more weeks until the Superdelegates choose the candidate and the democratic party falls apart.     

The point you are missing, xduckshoex, is that for every way to be express your dissatisifaction through anger, there is a way to express it not through anger that achieves as much positively, if not more, without the negativity.

For example, let's say the Black person does go around saying FU America over civil rights/racial issues. Who catches that? Lots of people who had nothing to do with the problem, who would be inherently sympathetic to his cause, but who are rather put off by being treated with hostility over the color of their skin. (chew on that one a little).

As for Wright's statements, saying God Damn America falls into the category of telling your wife you wished you had never married her when you have an argument. It is further than you need to go, than you should go, and it does more harm than good. And it ressonates especially poorly as a response to terrorists murdering a bunch of people who never did them any harm (did his remarks not  come in response to 9-11?)

I'm not missing that point, I'm aware of that fact. It's just not relevant.

And I'm really laughing at the whole "people who had nothing to do with the problem" bit, as though the problem Wright spoke of is something in the past.  This problem is a current problem, and it is something that we ALL have a hand in.  You should chew on that one a little.  I'm laughing even harder at your desire to have an oppressed minority walk on eggshells to spare the feelings of their oppressors.

As for Wright's statements, saying "God Damn America" falls into the category of telling your wife you wished you had never married her after she cheats on you and murders one of your children.  

Mike Huckabee defended Rev. Wright, surprisingly:

"ou can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do," Huckabee says. "It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what ... Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say 'Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that.'"

Later, he defended Wright's anger, too:

"As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement!' ... I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTFLOu8fjxU&eurl

And do we ALL have a hand in racial oppression, Xduck? Do I, by my mere existance in this world as a white man, subconciously oppress the black man? Personally I find that view not only offensive and nonsensical, but also enable--enabling of the minority--any minority who is claiming it--to go through life with a chip on their shoulder feeling that the problems they face are someone else's fault, never their own.

Of course racism exists. (So does racialism). Whether it is as widespread as the likes of Al Sharpton would like to claim is another matter. Also another matter is the issue of what fuels racism in the 20th century. Slavery is long gone, and Jim Crow is receeding in the rear-view mirror, so now what? Is it possible that by now this has become a more complex issue, with contributions from both sides?

Bull.  I'm moderate to liberal, and I'm fully in agreement with Murrog on this one.  Being white does not make someone automatically an oppressor.  And being black does not make every action that black person takes the inevitable result of victimhood.

The ancestors of most white Americans came to America in the waves of immigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, after slavery ended.  They therefore were not complicit in slavery.  Many were complicit in the racism that continued after slavery.  Many were not.  My grandparents came to America around 1900 and settled in central Maine, where until the 1980s there were only a handful of blacks because there were no jobs worth moving up there for.  There was no one there for them to be oppressing.

Kids today would be shocked to experience the kind of racism that Rev. Wright faced growing up, or the kind that was the standard in the South when I was growing up in the '60s.  There is remaining racism, and residues of racial institutions, that need to be remedied in ways that will require white involvement.  For example, the political decisions that it would take to improve inner city schools.  There are other problems affecting urban black America that can only be solved by blacks, such as the culture of teen pregnancy.  

Wright may have been talking about me. That doesn't mean he was right.

I have been judged based on the color of my skin. I am white, therefore I am.....fill in the blank with a variety of statements here--slaveholder--yes, I have been told that point blank--oppressor, etc.

Last time I checked, judging a person by the color of his skin qualified as racism. But a lot of folks seem to believe--and I have been told this to my face--"I can't be racist, I'm black!"

That attitude needs to get checked at the door.

Greenteam says it well. The solution to the remaining problems require a balanced approach. The problem is, balance is one thing people seem to want to aovi. It is much easier to take an extreme and run with it than to strive for an even-handed approach.

Well let's backtrack a bit so we don't lose track of what we were talking about.  I did not say that all white people specifically go out of their way to oppress black people, I made what was obviously a very general statement: white people are oppressors, black people are the oppressed. 

 I take issue with Murrog's assertion that there are white people who have nothing to do with the problem.  Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we benefit from our skin colour in huge ways every day and that is an unfair fact of life that will never correct itself unless we proactively try to level the playing field, instead of washing our hands of the problem because we have never personally owned a slave or hurled racial epithets at anybody.   Ignoring the problem is what allows it to persist and tighten its grip, so yes we all have a hand in racial oppression.

We are dealing with systemic racism now and I'm not sure how we can reasonably expect to place the blame for that on anyone but the people that are benefiting from it, and I really don't see how we can expect everybody else to overcome it, especially when we view it as somebody else's problem.