This one needed a couple more drafts. His main theme appears to be that "different does not mean deficient," a theme he also expressed, with tighter construction, at the National Press Club.
Wright had a host of interesting examples to present in support of this theme, if only they could have been explicated more clearly. The text reads as though it was delivered from notes, upon which Wright "riffed." This gives it a choppy, uncompleted quality. He is casting out allusions rather than completed thoughts. Take this snippet, for example:
In the 1961, it's been all over the Internet now, John Kennedy could stand at the inauguration in January and say, "ask not what your country can do for you, it's rather what you can do for your country." How do you spell is? Nobody ever said to John Kennedy that's not English "is". Only to a black child would they say you speak bad English. Kennedy got killed. Johnson stepped up to the podium and love feel, we just left love feel. And Johnson, said my fellow Americans. How do you spell fellow? How do you spell American? Nobody says to Johnson you speak bad English.
His point seems to be that white people can say certain things and no one accuses them of bad grammar, but a black person will be criticized for lesser grammatical offenses. This is all true enough, but could have been expressed in a more intelligible way. Reading through the transcript, I got the sense that there was a good speech in there somewhere, but it was struggling to get out.
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