Can you imagine the president of the United States attending a church where the pastor says everyone has a bit of “thug” in him and praises a rapper with a criminal record as a prophet?

How about a pastor who calls the biblical patriarch Abraham a “pimp” and says Noah and Moses were thugs, Jesus has a “soft spot for thugs,” and everyone has some “thug proclivities.”

If Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright speaks volumes about the presidential candidate’s values and judgment, it also spotlights the widespread black culture of victimhood that encourages failure.

Since I began writing Newsmax stories in early January about Wright’s so-called Black Value System, his award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan, and his claim that America created the AIDS virus to kill off blacks, I have received hundreds of e-mails from African American readers who insist a white person cannot understand what it means to be black and live with the legacy of slavery.