Rev. Wright is in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and
Dr.King among other charismatic African Americans. He may awaken the moribund Black community and the White establishment may come to rue the day they brought this man to the forefront.

Sent by louise frances | 10:23 AM ET | 04-28-2008

Reverend Wright has encouraged members of his congregation to believe that the United States government secretly developed the AIDS virus in order to infect the black population as a part of a campaign of racial genocide.

Similarly he has made claims that the government sold drugs to blacks in inner cities while deliberately raising the penalties for drug crimes in an effort to incarcerate as many as possible.

Such absurd claims as these have nothing to do with opposing slavery in the 19th century or the unjust Viet Nam War in the 20th.

The only ones who may rue the Wright connection are Obama supporters when all of this is revisited after the convention by the GOP and their surrogates.

And such is the cost of placing identity politics above the public good.

Sent by David | 10:47 AM ET | 04-28-2008

Whoohoo, man this is getting good. So far the lunacy of the lefty paranoia of Wrights so-called church has largely been flying under the radar and now that the left has been put in the uncomfortable position of having to defend Wright due to his intimate connection to Obama, we are gonna see all kinds of crazy contortions.

When you see Wright compared to Jesus Christ himself, the delusion will be complete.

Good luck with your "chosen one." LOL

Sent by deek | 11:44 AM ET | 04-28-2008

David:
Kindly tell us which group of people in this country were intentionally and malicious infected with syphilis by the governement?.......since you seem to know a lot.

Sent by Liza | 11:45 AM ET | 04-28-2008

Liza, as horrific as the Tuskeegee travesty was, don't delegitimize it's horror by telling untruths; no one was infected by syphillis, those men already had it.

Sent by deek | 12:27 PM ET | 04-28-2008

hmm... odd conclusion Dyson came to. How is leading a sanitation workers' strike *not* promoting equality? The entire point was that the Memphis sanitation workers were largely black & as a result were being underpaid in discriminatory fashion. Pay equity is a form of equality.

and deek: though the men in the study may not have been infected, by lying to them about their condition, their wives and children were subjected to the disease. So yes, Liza is technically incorrect about how things happened, but she is quite correct about the scale of the travesty committed.

Sent by Kasreyn | 3:14 PM ET | 04-28-2008

To connect these people to Dr. King is an INSULT...Dr. Martin Luther King represented and stood for so much more than these shallow characters...have we lost our minds or is this a classic case of "if you look hard enough you'll find what you're looking for....Dr. King communicated to "all people" and used language to engage all people into acting for the "common good"...these two individuals for all the talk of unifying have been nothing but divisive...am I the only one that see this...it appears that these two have done nothing but increase tensions and not in a way that seems to be moving us towards the goal that Dr. King set for us...after all this time, we should be able to disagree civily and not quickly want to connect race as the basis for disagreeing...I'm sure many of us have had experiences where you just don't like a person and it wouldn't matter what the race, gender, orientation, financial status,etc....we just have real HUMAN issues with each other, period...so why make it such a small, BIG issue...maybe the problems we have with each other is a combination of several factors and it's time to stop taking the shortcut by blaming race...

Sent by ard | 5:39 PM ET | 04-28-2008

Liz, the claim that men were deliberately infected with syphilis is an urban myth. I first looked into this when working on biomedical ethics in graduate school and there has been work recently published correcting this false account.

See the essay "Tuskegee Re-examined," by the University of Chicago cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder for a reliable overview. Shweder writes, "that in 1932 the concept of informed consent had not even been imagined by medical professionals, almost all of whom, if has been argued, deeply believed in the Hippocratic 'tradition of paternalistic secrecy in the doctor/patient relationship' (2). Benedek and Erlen also remark that 'there were no generally accepted ideas before WW II about what information physicians were obliged to give their patients' (p24). The implication is that doctors in the 1930s often did not disclose information to their patients and frequently deceived them, not necessarily because of evil motives or because they were engaged in acts of betrayal, but (as maddening as it may seem by current American standards) because they kept their paternalistic eyes fixed on some imagined greater good."

Also see Jones, J. (1993) Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Free Press: New York; and Reverby, S.M. (2000) Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, N.C.

Furthermore, if one granted the urban myth account of Tuskegee, which concluded over 30 years aog, it is evidentially irrelevant to any claims about AIDS being concocted by the United States Government. If you have any knowledge of forensic evidence or documentation in reliable sources in the contrary to the standard scientific account of the genesis of the AIDS virus, then be so kind as to present it.

Of course most people would rather believe what they want to believe whether there is evidence or not. So you are free to choose to accept the "Reverend" Wright's ideologically motivated hyper-emotional views if you wish. One can lead the horse to the water, but one cannot force it to drink (or in this case to think.)

Sent by David | 5:52 PM ET | 04-28-2008

Although the US didn't give the men the disease, but what they did do was even worst and it goes to show the world just how low life the American government can be. I wouldn't put anything pass them. We will all pay the price for our sins in the end and America has a lot to pay for.

Sent by sheikwil | 3:22 PM ET | 05-04-2008