Please listen to me speak to you in all due respect. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with a White boy. We were both entertainers and were attracted to each other almost immediately.
That was during the 60s when people looked at you like you were dirt when they saw you together. That look changed my life. I never knew I could feel so little until I was with him.
We got along fine when it was just the two of us or other entertainers because entertainers don't have a prejudiced bone in their bodies. They naturally love everybody because everybody can be a fan.
But the looks we received made me feel so rejected, so little, and so unwanted that I never knew before just how much people could hurt you without even touching you.
And two of my best friends, one named Ruth Bluitt and the other named Francine Galloway, were White. We were very good friends and I used to spend the summer with Francine. I had never once felt like that with them. But with my boyfriend, I never realized a look could hurt me so much, right to the core of my being.
I'm just telling White people that you can't possibly know how Black people feel from the treatment we receive from you during the course of our lifetime. You can pretend by putting on some makeup and trying to go Black for a day or so to see what will happen, but that will NEVER compare to living a lifetime of being Black in this country.
I say this because I know what Reverend Wright was talking about personally. I know because I have the education to have learned like he did and can feel every word he has to say.
And nobody, if you are not Black, can feel our pain because there's no way possible you have enough empathy to walk in our shoes for a lifetime. You can only imagine and when you do imagine, you only find excuses for not feeling the way we do because you haven't experienced what we have.
One example of a White person who will NEVER know how we feel is Bill O'Reilly. He is so White that he lives in a totally different world than we do.
That's why Obama spoke about his White grandmother. Because he loves her very much and can understand her reactions to Blacks because he was a constant reminder. But she loved him anyway. It was easy for him to walk in her shoes because in essence, he came out of those shoes.
That's way he has the compassion and empathy to feel all our pain. And when he met and had religious training with Reverend Wright, he met a man who was a strong force in his own beliefs. But the good Reverend is not a brainwasher. He guided Obama in The Word with his religious understanding and expertise.
He never had to speak those particular specifics to Obama because Obama was an intelligent individual who had a world view different than his own. Obama wanted a religious connection to our world because he didn't have what he saw that we had.
I would bet my life on the fact that Reverend Wright never preached to Obama in that manner. There was no need. The Reverend preached to those who needed to hear that type of lecture which would fulfill their needs, not Obama's. I've heard preaching like that all my life and it has never turned me into a hater or made me prejudice in any way. It only made me understand what was going on around me and opened my eyes to a lot of things I would not have ordinarily seen on my own.
For those of you who can't fathom the good Reverend for saying things like our country giving Aids to the Blacks; or pushing drugs in the Black neighborhoods; and other statements that you can't imagine, I am listing below three videos which will help you understand exactly where Reverend Wright was coming from.
On the first video is what the good Reverend has seen, witnessed, and learned throughout his lifetime. On that video are the atrocities of which the good Reverend speaks of to his people, and that they don't know about.
The good Reverend has the education to know these things and that's what gives him the insight he has to deliver these sermons.
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