By Shailagh Murray
PHILADELPHIA -- Sen. Barack Obama sought to quell the political
firestorm stirred by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright with a deeply
personal speech about black anger, white anger, and the gulf that race
continues to represent in U.S. society.

"Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore
right now," Obama asserted. "We would be making the same mistake that
Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America -- to
simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it
distorts reality."

The 37-minute speech had consumed Obama in recent days. For the first
time in a year, he was faced with a potentially lethal threat to his
candidacy that was only partly within his control. Wright's racially
charged rhetoric, a throwback the militant 1970s, threatened to
sabotage a campaign built around the ideas of unity and change. Obama
denounced Wright's comments when they surfaced on Friday, but he knew
interviews wouldn't be enough. And so he began crafting today's
speech, at once pained and unnerved by the task at hand.

Obama spoke with a serious voice, reading each word carefully from the
teleprompter. The audience sat silently until halfway through the text
-- an eternity for an Obama event, where casual one-liners are often
met with a standing ovation.

"I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from
Kansas," Obama declared to the hushed auditorium. "And for as long as
I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my
story even possible," he said.

In his 20s, after years of struggling with his racial identity, Obama
began attending Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's
South Side. It provided him with a community and identity that was
missing in his itinerant upbringing. And after being raised by his
white grandparents, it also brought him deeper into the African
American fold.

"As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me," said Obama
of Wright. "He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and
baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I
heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat
whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.
He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad --
of the community that he has served diligently for so many years."

Obama again denounced the inflammatory statements that have dominated
cable news and talk radio coverage in recent days. "Reverend Wright's
comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we
need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together
to solve a set of monumental problems."

But he added, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black
community. 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 her by on the street, and who on more than one
occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me
cringe."

"These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this
country that I love."

He tackled the rich subculture of the African American church
experience. "Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of
raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing,
and clapping, and screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the
untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty,
the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and
successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up
the black experience in America."

There also is anger. And "that anger is not always productive," said
Obama. "But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it
away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to
widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

He added, "In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the
white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't
feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race."

Wright's mistake, said Obama, "is not that he spoke about racism in
our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no
progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made
it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office
in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and
Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a
tragic past."

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