Comments for The black church arrives on America's doorstep at http://inthefray.org , comment 1 to 3 out of 3 comments http://inthefray.org Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:05:10 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://inthefray.org/content/view/2704/232/#comment-3099 Video Massage therapy for hand http://traditional-medicine-traditional.blogspot.com/2008/08/video-massage-hand.html - Ash Hash Sun, 24 Aug 2008 02:43:22 +0100 http://inthefray.org/content/view/2704/232/#comment-2957 Thank you for your comments. I accept your notion that many white people sympathize with Wright's comments. What I don't however accept is your statement that race is "not that relevant" anymore. I also don't accept your suggestion that the same conversation on race is happening in predominately white communities/settings as is being had in black and brown communities/settings . If that were the case, you and I wouldn't be exchanging comments now. I agree that things should be different. But they aren't. It's important to note that neither white nor black communities are monolithic and in fact you would be hard pressed to even define what those terms mean. Not every person who identifies as being black agrees with Wright's comments, nor am I even remotely suggesting that they should. But the experiences of people who identify a certain way racially is not irrelevant to their perspective. The fact that Sunday morning is such a heavily segregated moment of the American week is a testament to the fact that Americans and their experiences are still deeply divided by race. I don't have any hard data to support this, but I would venture to say that Wright's comments struck a chord with a hell of a lot more black people and other people of color, than with white people. The fact of the matter is that the narratives of newspapers and media outlets that are dominated by the views of predominately white, liberal, men - like the New York Times, for instance - assume Wright's comments were incendiary, hateful and marginal. That is not shared by what I would call the mainstream black press. There's a reason for that. As absurd a notion as race ultimately is, it would be a mistake to dismiss people's views and experiences that are influenced by it. I would argue that being "color-blind" is not the same thing as seeing people's full humanity. In fact, Obama was trying to wake America up to the reality of racial division, not paper over it. In order to get past America's fixation on race and racism, you have to first acknowledge that it is exists. - Mark Winston Griffith Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:32:17 +0100 http://inthefray.org/content/view/2704/232/#comment-2954 Ok, it's true that many americans secretly sympathize with Rev. Wright's comments. What your article failed to mention, Mark, is that it is not just black americans that feel that way. While you are trying to distance yourself from the content of the mainstream media, you are still accepting their general paradigm: that Americans are extremely divided along racial lines, that it still makes sense to categorize and analyze Americans according to the black and the white constituencies. There are many of us with eyes wide open to the atrocities in America's past and present, and who are working hard to avoid those that seem to be inevitably in our future. Some of us are white. Some of us are black. But who cares? Why use that single criteria to understand who we are? It's not that relevant anymore. Many of us have our eyes closed to America's evils, unwilling to give up our mindless flag-waving nationalism. Some of us are white. Some of us are black. We are facing an evil greater than racism. MLK acknowledged it. And he thought we could overcome it. I think we can too, but the first step is to move beyond racism. - Caleb Friz Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:00:09 +0100