If you have 40 Minutes to spare, watch and listen to this video series.

Dr. Wright is certainly a dynamic and charismatic speaker and this speech is certainly a very good one. I was interested and engaged all the way through.

I really have only 2 comments:

1) What a great message, delivered with great style and rhetorical power.

2) Imagine this speech given by a white person, using the “white speaking style”, given to the same audience.

I certainly agree with the Doctor’s point of “Different is not deficient”. It is the kind of idea that needs light and oxygen. It needs to be brought to the people, ALL the people, if we are ever going to close the racial divide in the country.

It’s too bad that most of what was said in this speech contradicts “Black Liberation Theology“. He did touch, lightly, on the connection of his theology to political action, but came short of exposing the Marxist nature of that philosophy. The parts about other religions, specifically the “white church” was quite non-representative of the theology he preaches when not in front of cable news cameras. His message of inclusion is 180 degrees from his past statements and statements of Dr. Cone.

The trouble with this idea coming from this massager is that the “bitter” and “clinging to religion” public (i.e. the rubes in the midwest) will not have the slightest inkling that Black Liberation Theology is so caustic and hateful to them and will embrace the man, not the message.

Read the comments at the link to see what I mean.

Update and bump: Dr. Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club is very interesting. His prepared remarks are a slightly watered-down version of his NAACP remarks, but that is not what is interesting. The Q&A portion shows a very different persona than his is pushing in the prepared portions of his speeches. Evasive, demeaning and combative are good adjectives.

No direct link yet, but CSPAN has terrible/nasty Real Player video. Skip to the last 20 minutes for the Q&A portion.