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Sorry, sleepyjeff, but, as insane as Reverend Wright's sermons (at least as excerpted in the media) may be, they aren't racist. Essentially, he rails on the government, which in his eyes has not atoned for the evils of slavery and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His message in the most famous sermon clip was that we don't have God's favor because we haven't acknowledged these crimes in our own past. His use of the phrase "God Damn America" was intended to sound shocking and it did. But, not a word about white people being inherently evil or inferior. (Yes, it's implicit that those bad things were done by the white people in charge, which is hard to deny.) Not a rational or useful view to my mind, but not "hate whitey" talk either. It's hardly any different than Jerry Falwell's famous on-air contention that God had lifted his hand of protection from us because of the ACLU and feminists and so on. (actually, Falwell's strikes me as miles more stupid. At least slavery really is factually an atrocity - so are the mass bombings of civilians in Japan, to my mind, though I know some would argue that those actions prevented more deaths than they caused - that's another conversation.)
Barack Obama was born into a world where black Americans did not yet have equal rights. Of course the political discourse in the black community still carries that baggage, with resentments, mistrust and suspicions that make perfect sense to the people who were until so recently second-class citizens. Of course sermons in black churches reflect this. It would be really surprising if they didn't.
It has never been shown that Obama attended this particular sermon, but it seems reasonable to guess that he heard plenty of this sort of "evil government" rhetoric in church and in his community. So did I. My father gave it to me every day, just from a white Evangelical point of view. He's not a racist either, by the way. And he loves America, passionately. But he thinks the government is evil to this day. (In his mind, the great atrocity is legalized abortion.) He's not crazy. He has strong beliefs that offend some other citizens. I sat through tons of church services loaded with this kind of talk.
I read Obama's memoir well before he won the nomination, and he talks plenty about the various ideas about race he encountered growing up. It sounds as though he filtered it all and gave it rational consideration, just like I did to all the ugly and stupid things I was told day in and day out. If I remember correctly, he credited Pastor Wright with enlightening him about civil rights ideas we do not now find at all controversial. Wright is certainly a provocateur, but racist? I'm not convinced. (And no, I don't count his joke about how white people can't keep rhythm on the off beat - that's not racist, it's too often sadly true - and would be perfectly acceptable if it was pointed out by a black comic.)
Even if it could be shown that Wright really thinks whites are devils, it doesn't prove a thing about Obama. It's a really old talking point that didn't fly during the presidential campaign and doesn't make any sense now.
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