Excerpts from Dreams From My Fathers

I heard these excerpts from Dreams From My Fathers on the radio yesterday. I was shocked and alarmed that this man seems so close to the presidency!

OBAMA: It's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't just the cruelty involved, I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our better laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place or at least thought you deserving of their scorn.

OBAMA: So I read the book to help me understand what it is that makes white people so afraid, their demons, the way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.

OBAMA: The point I was making was not that my grandmother, uh, harbors any, uh, racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is, uh, a typical white person who if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, you know, there's a reaction that's bred into our experiences that -- that doesn't go away and that sometimes come out in -- in the wrong way.

OBAMA: The emotions between the races could never be pure. Even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or our salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

The problem I have with these passages is that he lumps all white people together into one (inherently evil) category. According to Obama the value a white person has in life is not a matter of the way he or she chooses or behaves. It is a matter of the color of his or her skin at birth. And no one gets to choose their skin color at birth.

Obama claims to be against racism, and that's fine with me. I don't understand how he can advance that cause through racism and bigotry. If he really does care about the demons that people carry inside them, he should not be looking at the outward appearances. Demons don't choose their hosts that way, and skin color does not give them any right to be in anyone's life.

Instead he ought to focus on things like anxiety, phoniness, hypocrisy, and self-deception. The things the government cannot assist anyone with except to make the problem worse.