Richard Trumka’s Speech on Barack Obama and Racism at the United Steelworkers Convention
Posted by Paul Woodhouse at October 30th, 2008
Here’s the speech United Mine Workers President Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, gave at the United Steelworkers national convention in Las Vegas this past July.
It’s one of those wonderfully empassioned working class pleas that you don’t see that often in this day and age. In a nutshell, he’s making the case for Barack Obama and against racism.
“We can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there” — a lot of them are good union people, he added — who “just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man.”
In the speech, Trumka went on to say that while there are many reasons to vote for Obama, there’s “only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that’s because he’s not white.”
Just watch it.
His occasional Oliver Hardy-isms are also quite entertaining.
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This guy is the man!
Such a good speech and so true.
We were jsut talking about this as a mtter of fact. It seems weird not being bombarded with election stuff now that its over…
Oh I don’t know. We can go transition crazy and speculate like loons about who his picks are gonna be and how they’ll pan out.
And we can still keep watching it over and over again on Youtube…;-)
Nice post.