And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.-Sen. Barack Obama, yesterday, to parishioners at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.
Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for president, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others -- all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face -- war and poverty; injustice and inequality.
We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.
Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.
Despite being an overwhelming Democratic constituency, there is a huge anti-gay, anti-Jew, anti-Mexican contingent witin the African-American community. And just as he was able to stand in front of auto makers in Detroit and tell them to stop whining about their plight and do something about it, the Senator from Illinois has the cajones to stand in front of his own community and call them on their shit. And that solidifies his already huge lead in my mind over who would best lead the Democratic Party to a Reagan-style landslide victory in November.
The entire 34-minute speech is here:
