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WASHINGTON -- Sen. Barack Obama, hoping to silence the firestorm over race that has engulfed his presidential campaign since his pastor's anti-American sermons began circulating Friday, today called for America to "move beyond some of our old racial wounds" to unite around issues.

In what was billed as one of the defining speeches of his campaign, Obama said Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comments expressed "a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America." FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this report made reference to the Declaration of Independence instead of the Constitution.
Obama said Wright's comments were "not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity, racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems -- two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic healthcare crisis and potentially devastating climate change." The nation's problems, Obama said, "are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all."

Seeking to recapture the message of racial unity that marked his campaign kick-off more than a year ago, Obama spoke to supporters at the National Constitution Center, a museum in Philadelphia honoring the nation's founding. Standing at a podium in front of eight U.S. flags, Obama sought to distance himself from Wright's racially-tinged remarks without denigrating the man who has been his pastor for nearly 20 years, officiated at his wedding and baptized his two daughters.

Wright, who retired last year from the Trinity United Church of Christ, alleged in inflammatory sermons that blacks are mistreated by white culture and that the Sept. 11 terror attack was retribution for past U.S. crimes, such as the bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.

But Obama also said that the videotaped "snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and YouTube," or the "caricatures being peddled by some commentators," distort Wright's appeal. "The man I met more than 20 years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another, to care for the sick and lift up the poor." Wright, he said, "is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine . . . and who for over 30 years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work on Earth by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy."

Talking about his own racial heritage -- son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya -- Obama said that his wife Michelle "carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners -- an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters." Noting that he has relatives "of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents," Obama said that "for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

As for Wright, he said, "I can no more disown him 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....These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."

Obama said that he began the campaign as the candidate whose appeal crossed racial lines. "Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country," he said. But in the last few weeks, he said, the discussion "has taken a particularly divisive turn."

He referred to former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro's recent comments that she believed he would not have achieved his front-runner status if he were not African American.

"On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmation action, that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap," he said. "On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, that rightly offend white and black alike."

The challenge, he said, is not to paper over the comments but to explore them, not to "retreat into our respective corners" but to come together with respect for each other's history and solve shared problems.

"We can dismiss Rev. Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro . . . as harboring some deep-seated racial bias," he said. Arguing that the nation cannot afford to ignore the issue of race, Obama said that "if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together."

Tracing the history of racial injustice, Obama said that "segregated schools were, and are inferior schools." Fifty years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that was supposed to open educational opportunity to every American child, Obama said that "the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students."

He talked about "legalized discrimination," when blacks were prevented from owning property or joining unions. He talked about the "wealth and income gap between black and white" that helps explain "the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities." He talked about a lack of economic opportunity among black men, about the "shame and frustration" of not being able to provide for family, about "the erosion of black families" and black neighborhoods, about the remarkable achievement of many who overcame the odds.

"For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away," he said. "That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table ... and occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews." The fact that so many were surprised by Wright's anger, he said, "reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning."

Likewise, he said, many working class and middle class white Americans feel they've had to work all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions eviscerated. Too often, he said, racial progress is viewed as a "zero sum game, in which your dreams come 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 committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentments build over time."

White resentment, like anger within the black community, "have helped shape the political landscape for a generation," he said. Now, he added, both black and white have to "move beyond some of our old racial wounds."

"The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society," he said. "It's that he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress has been made." Instead, he said, "America can change. That is the true genius of this nation."

Noting the Constitution signed just across the hall, Obama said the document the founders produced "was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished -- stained by the nation's original sin of slavery." Now, he said, whites need to acknowledge that the legacy of racial discrimination does not just exist in the imagination of African Americans but that it is real, and to acknowledge this by investing in schools and providing "ladders of opportunity." And blacks, he said, need to be respectful of their history, without becoming victims of it.

Urging a moratorium on speech "as fodder for the nightly news," Obama urged the political culture not to "pounce on some gaffe" by a supporter for rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or speculate on why white men are voting for Republican John McCain.

"We can do that," he said. "Or, at this moment, in this moment in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.' " Calling instead for a discussion of issues and a renewed national effort to overcome racial injustice, he concluded, "As so many generations have come to realize over the course of the 221 years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."

johanna.neuman@latimes.com