Obama Telegraphed His Inclination to Divide Along Racial Lines in an '08 Campaign Speech. Not That Anyone Cared to See or Hear It at the Time

We shouldn't be surprised that Barack Obama, the man who was supposed to transform America into a post-racial Utopia, has turned out to exacerbate racial divisions instead of healing them. After all, in an infamous speech he delivered back in '08, the one in which he semi-apologized for having a close, personal relationship with race-baiting, America-hating preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama quoted a passage from his own book to 'splain the appeal of Wright's church--and went on to throw his own white granny, the woman who raised him, under the wheels of the church bus:

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I describe the experience of my first service at Trinity:  

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters. And in that single note — hope! — I heard something else: At the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories — of survival and freedom and hope — became our stories, my story. The blood that spilled was our blood, the tears our tears, until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black. In chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a meaning to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about — memories that all people might study and cherish, and with which we could start to rebuild."  

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety — the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing and clapping and screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.  

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.  

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.  

These people are a part of me. And they are part of America, this country that I love. ...

How could Americans hear these words and expect that Obama would be a "healer"? How could they not expect that he'd further the highly divisive victimhood Marxism of Rev. Wright--the same sort of thinking that gave rise to Black Lives Matter and dead cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge?