奥巴马费城演讲中英文对照文稿“amoreperfectunion

奥巴马费城演讲中英文对照文稿“amoreperfectunion内容摘要：

away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to e together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American. Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the AfricanAmerican munity today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools。 we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students. Legalized discrimination where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to AfricanAmerican business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and ine gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural munities. A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pickup and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other AfricanAmericans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds。 how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would e after them. But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away。 nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings. And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive。 indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems。 it keeps us from squarely facing our own plicity in our condition, and prevents the AfricanAmerican munity from fing the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real。 it is powerful。 and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races. In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white munity. Most working and middleclass white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s han ded them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away。 in an era of stagnant wages and global petition, opportunity es to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams e at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town。 when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never mitted。 when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. Like the anger within the black munity, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite pany. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped fe the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative mentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussion。