About-Face on Wright 'No Way to Start a Dialogue'

Coming together “isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Gregory Rodriguez writes in the LA Times, and Barack Obama's attempt to start a national dialogue on race was foiled by an unlikely actor: Barack Obama. Jeremiah Wright "didn't really say anything new last week," Rodriguez argues. "He called Obama’s bluff.”

"Obama evidently hoped a racial dialogue would amount to a tidy academic seminar in the well-behaved, elite Ivy League," the columnist writes. But race is "not about statistics or civil rights cases, politics or access to healthcare. It's not even about redress or reconciliation,” he writes. "It's about memories and respect, hurt feelings and long grudges, fears and expectations." (More Barack Obama stories.)