On trouve ci-dessus la vidéo et ici la transcription du discours que Barack Obama vient de prononcer sur la question raciale à Philadelphie. Le sénateur de l'Illinois n'a pas seulement évoqué sa relation avec Jeremiah Wright mais également l'héritage raciste des États-Unis et la nécessité de transcender ce passé. Tout en condamnant à nouveau les propos incendiaires de son pasteur, il a déclaré qu'il ne pouvait pas le renier, pas plus qu'il ne pouvait renier sa grand-mère blanche, qui a déjà tenu des propos racistes en sa présence. Je le cite dans le texte :
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can 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 by her 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 a part of America, this country that I love.
Je cite un autre extrait dans le texte concernant le pasteur Wright :
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.