【正文】 , the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about?memories that all peopl e 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 munity in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gangbanger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, 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 bias 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 munity that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black munity. 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. Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse ments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deepseated racial bias. But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. The fact is that the ments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the plexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to e together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American. Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the AfricanAmerican munity today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools。 a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. As such, Reverend Wright’s ments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity。 statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law。 to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a . Marine。 nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings. And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive。 a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests。 by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system。 然而，能夠最終抓住機(jī)會(huì)成就自己美國(guó)夢(mèng)的黑人畢竟只是少數(shù)，他們中仍然有許多人無(wú)法實(shí)現(xiàn)自己的夢(mèng)想 — — 以這樣或那樣的方式屈服于種族歧視的夢(mèng)魘。許多人都對(duì)耐特布道中的激烈言辭感到震驚，但是這不過(guò)再次證明了一個(gè)事實(shí)，那就是在美國(guó)，周日早上的這段教堂的禱告時(shí)間，種族隔離問(wèn)題最為激化。他們對(duì)自己的未來(lái)感到焦慮，感覺(jué)自己距離夢(mèng)想已經(jīng)漸行漸遠(yuǎn)。 和黑人們的情感宣泄常常帶來(lái)消極作用一樣，白人們的憤