Black people can dieEveryone has heard by now that Rev. Wright has expressed his fear that perhaps AIDS was developed by white people to kill black people. This is, of course, absurd, but Rev. Wright is not speaking from racism. He is speaking from fear. Rev. Wright grew up when white people treated black people like dirt.

It was in 1972 that the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male ended. The purpose of the study was to observe the progression of syphilis in untreated patients. When the study started in 1932, there was no cure for syphilis but a cure was found with the development of penicillin and by 1947, syphilis treatment was routine, effective and safe. But not for the black men in the Tuskegee study. They were denied treatment and their disease was allowed to continue to ravage their minds and bodies. It ended in 1972, not because the government decided that allowing a treatable disease to remain untreated was immoral, but because a whistle blower found out about the study and reported it to the The Washington Star and The New York Times. Rev. Wright was 30 years old.

When I was a child, black people in the south were denied educations. They were forced to use separate rest rooms from white people. They were denied the vote. Rev. Wright experienced this first hand so his feelings are understandable, at least to me. Obama has said that the issue with Rev. Wright is a generational one, that Obama has had different experiences in the US but that he can understand how people of Rev. Wright’s generation feel.

It is now time to move on from this issue. The office of the POTUS and the future of the US is too important to be spending so much time on what is a non-issue.