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The contentious, much reviled Reverend Jeremiah Wright is interviewed by PBS’s only good man, Bill Moyers.

I’m no fan of the crescendo of Wright’s infamous sermon, but you’ve got to have lived a pretty sheltered life to not understand that there are reasons - social, cultural, historical - for the non-’mainstream’ ideologies and points-of-view that are on display therein.

These ideologies, which are (to me) admittedly too self-righteously leftist and not historically balanced, exist for a reason, or for several reasons. Some of those can be addressed by dialogue, and I think Barry Obama was on the mark in his response to the criticism - it’s a conversation that we’ve got to have, for the health of our nation’s heart and soul.

I don’t blame ‘White people’ for all Black suffering, but I surely don’t blame Black people for not roundly embracing all things America, not a century and a half after human slavery ended here, in our country.

I’m for the conversation, where it can be had. I don’t think we’ll have it with Hillary.

From Barry O’s speech:

• I can no more disown him [the Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

• These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

• Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

• But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

• The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

He may not (or may yet) become president, but he’s a good man, either way, in his willingness to dare to be honest, without peddling homilies or inventing anecdotes, like Mrs. Clinton seems to do as easily as Jeremiah Wright gives into hyperbole.