While sitting in with the ladies of the "Today" show's fourth hour Monday, Rosie O'Donnell said many people have mistaken her "passion for rage" – much in the same way some Americans have misunderstood Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
"This man is following a tradition of black preachers and there is a righteous indignation about people who were only considered three-fourths a person until fairly recently in our history," said the former talk show host of Barack Obama's former pastor. "And that his anger, which annoys some and forces some to look at issues that America is not really ready to face, is the actual issue. That racism does exist in this country and it's still thriving."
"Here's what I think," she continued. "There is a place in the world, an inspirational, liberational kind of preaching that Rev. Wright does that when you read something that's sort of – I was not as offended as the people in the polls that I read. I listen to him, and frankly, it made sense to me. I totally understood what he was saying."
"That we introduced AIDS into the black community?" asked "Today" co-anchor Kathy Lee Gifford.
O'Donnell responded: "But Kathy, you know what it's like for someone to pull one quote out of context for you. He was comparing it to when the government did give syphilis to black Americans for 40 years. What he was saying is in his history, in his genetic memory, he knows what it's like for the government to infect his own people because he lived through those Tuskegee experiments. And that's what he was talking about.
"You can't sort of pull the quote. He didn't just say, you know, 'the government made AIDS.'" It's the same [as] when I said, you know, you can support the [troops] and not the man who sent them there. You can support every single Marine and Army man and Navy man in this war."
