Obama avoids race on King's 'Dream' anniversary

Long before Denver, the drum roll of history began: If Barack Obama could capture the Democratic nomination for president, he would deliver the biggest speech of his life exactly 45 years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s immortal "I Have a Dream" address.

And so Obama accepted the nomination Thursday night standing on the shoulders of King and thousands of others who suffered and bled to give blacks the right to vote - Yet Obama did not speak King's name.

...Forty-five years later, Obama did not utter the words "black" or "African-American."

We are caught in a bind. A lot of our time is being taken up fighting this Obama character. It's catch 22. Obama can hurt the African American community. It can also hurt the African-American community if we focus on Obama too much. The same can happen if we pay to little.

No matter who is president, public pressure must be applied to support or push against whatever issue is at hand. What are the problems in our country. What are the underlying reasons for these problems. How can we fix them. It doesn't matter if it is Obama, McCain or the Devil himself.

Oh, By The Way, I'm White

Sharon Marquez, editor of the Chillicoth Gazette, a newspaper from the newspaper network of Central Ohio, wrote an article about a Klansman who was riding in the back of a pickup truck with a "trashy sign" that would speed away whenever someone tried to approach him.

I appreciate the article. I really do. But the last sentence of the article was "By the way, I am not a person of color. I am white." I think it was odd that she felt she needed to qualify the article as if her words were not powerful enough. It is as if she expects her audience to only believe that an African-American or some other hyphen-American would be willing to write those words.

It really does show how pitiful people must be if we expect them to act like that. How much bigotry is there in the United States where people do not recognize that there has been and always will be a section of White America that acts against injustice. It has been there since the Atlantic slave trade and continues to this day. But the expectation in America appears to be White neglect of race related issues.