Obama Speech Philadelphia

If you want to understand why Rev. Jeremiah Wright said the U.S. government invented AIDS, or what Barack Obama sought to accomplish in his Philadelphia speech on race, the best commentary is political scientist Marc Howard Ross's book Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict -- even if it never...

Like many of us, I was inspired by Sen. Barack Obama's recent eloquent speech on healing racial and other divisions in this country. His words resonated with my personal experiences. In 1981, for example, when my friend and I moved to Boston to start our medical internships at Massachusetts...

Voters of many persuasions have viewed Barack Obama as coming from the left. Yet in his March 18 speech, addressing both his relationship to the black activist preacher Jeremiah Wright and the history of slavery and race oppression in the United States, Obama hymned the creation of the U.S. Constitution...

Howard,

In these quisling replies to Obama's remarkable speech, in the evident terror from both the GOP and the Clinton campaign that they are up against a potentially great man who must, therefore, be destroyed, we encounter again, in a different form, the politics of hate. This is hate...

"Most men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and continue as if nothing happened." -- Winston Churchill

Churchill's words about the human propensity to ignore the truth that is right in front of us reminds me of the mainstream media's response to Senator Obama's speech...

I've been trying not to write about The Speech, but since a billion trillion people have asked for my take, I decided to offer it up:

I read the speech transcript because I couldn't bear to watch pundits with as much courage as Obama has in one thumbnail rip it...

Barack Obama delivered a truly brilliant and inspiring speech this week. There were a few things, however, that he did not and could not (and, indeed, should not) say:

He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with...

Earlier today, I spoke with distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about yesterday's speech by Barack Obama on race in America.

My full conversation with Dr. Gates airs tonight on PBS.

Read more HuffPost coverage and...

I watched Barack Obama's speech yesterday morning intently. The "pre-game show" of cable commentators predicted a somewhat grim outcome. What could Obama say that could possibly overcome his association with the words of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Would he throw his pastor on the train tracks? And even if he...