“Obama can’t fix racism by getting elected any more than Hillary can fix sexism.”
And those on the left cannot countenance the idea that the simple fact that one of the two major political parties will be choosing between a woman and a person of color for their presidential candidate is prima facie evidence of the dramatic decline in sexism and racism in the United States.
“Obama said his grandmother was afraid of black men writ large.”
Actually, in his book he said she was afraid of a specific black man who aggressively panhandled her on a bus.
In his Phila. speech he turned that into a more generalized fear of black men, but that isn’t how he originally described the incident.
Obama would have been wise to have affiliated with a different church, one in DC, when he was elected to the Senate. That would have given him some kind of distance between himself and Wright in the event of a possible presidential run. Instead, as the Obamas’ own wealth increased, they donated $46,000 to the church, a church that Sen. Obama must now profess to be clueless about their teachings and preachings.
The best thing that Obama could do, for the country, is to call out other blacks on their credulous belief in a whole raft of conspiracy theories and magical thinking.
The Tuskeegee Experiment is not an excuse for believing nonsense. Actually, many blacks believe nonsense about the Tuskeegee experiment itself by claiming that the government deliberately infected black men with syphilis, which isn’t true. The study involved sharecroppers that public health officials had already identified as infected.
BTW, the fact that they were untreated is less of an ethical issue than the fact that they were lied to about receiving treatment and the various procedures they endured. The original author of the experiment resigned over that issue. His original design called for the experiment to run for a year, after which the subjects would receive normal treatments. Like I said, as designed the Tuskeegee Experiment was more akin to a modern day placebo study, particularly since the available treatments in the 1930s didn’t do much good.
While it was unethical for them to continue the experiment into the late 1940s, it was truly heinous to continue it once a truly effective treatment, penicillin, became available.
