Barack Obama's speech on Race in America, 3/18/08

Cick on the arrow at the bottom of the box twice to play.

Obama speaks of his grandmother - she loves him, but he has heard her say that she was afraid to walk down a street past black teenagers, or has heard her utter racial stereotypes that have made him cringe.

Well...I'd like to ask him two questions.

1. What kind of a neighborhood was his grandmother afraid to walk down? If it was a middle-class black neighborhood, then yeah, she's racist. If it was a poor neighborhood...maybe she had a reason to be afraid? That's the neighborhoods where black pastors are telling their congregations that whites are the enemy, isn't it?

[Apparently he covers this in his book. She'd been standing at a bus-stop, and threatened by a black panhandler, so the next day she asked to be driven to work because she was afraid to stand at the bus stop. Obama reveals his anger at his grandfather for granting her request.]

2. Has Mr Obama ever been called by the racial epithet "Oreo?" If so - what was the color of people who were calling him that? For many blacks, anyone who is the child of a white mother and a black father, or vice versa, is an "oreo" or some other racial epithet. Any black who gets an education and moves into "middle-classness" has "sold out." Some blacks are just as racist as some whites...yet I don't think I heard Mr. Obama point out that obvious fact.