What Barack Obama means to America - PLEASE SEND TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

Inspiration for the young

Hope and concern

Elder in awe

Issues, solutions trump race in U.S. election

by Lisa Van Dusen/10.26.08

On the evening of last Jan. 26 at the Columbia, S.C., Convention Center, something happened in the middle of Barack Obama's victory speech.

Obama had beaten Hillary Clinton 55%-27% in that day's primary, results that were seen at least in part as a referendum on the issue of race, especially among whites, a quarter of whom voted for Obama.

"We have the most votes the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we've seen in a long, long time," Obama said.

From the bleachers behind him, a new chant erupted.

"Race doesn't matter! Race doesn't matter!"

It was an admonishment to the other side and a dare to the rest of the country.

In the past two weeks, the rest of the country seems to have responded. Obama is now at least ten points ahead in most polls. More crucially, especially for the question of whether America was ready for a black president, 48 percent now say they have confidence in Obama serving as commander in chief, statistically even with McCain's 50 percent, and seven out of 10 now say race won't be a factor in their vote.

Those numbers have shifted in the past six weeks, as Obama has passed every leadership test McCain has failed, from his choice of running mate to his handling of the economy to his daily campaign decisions (at a certain point, momentum becomes its own leadership indicator).

After months of uncertainty about whether there was a ceiling beyond which racial attitudes would limit his support, the issue has been clarified by both voters' economic concerns and Obama's obvious strengths.

Obama is now leading in states such as Indiana and Virginia that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson's landslide against Barry Goldwater in 1964, when the demographic divisions over his newly passed Civil Rights Act hadn't yet gelled and the nation was still mourning president Kennedy.

ACCOMPLISHMENT

No matter what happens in the next nine days, the success of their 50-state strategy is an accomplishment that not just Obama but his Chicago strategists won't have to tell their grandchildren about because they'll learn it in civics class.

What they may also learn is that, in this election, the path from voter intention to ballot to official result was especially daunting.

The 2000 Florida recounts exposed more about the sausage-making details of democracy than just chads and hanging chads, it revealed the extent to which voter suppression had become the new black art of political warfare and it's only grown more sophisticated since then.

Since Congress passed the misleadingly named Help America Vote Act in 2002, partisan election officials have purged, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, more than 2.7 million voters from the rolls. In 2004, more than 1.6 million votes were never counted.

Environmental lawyer and Democratic activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose birthright must give him an acute appreciation for the lengths to which people will go to subvert democracy, founded the website NoVoterLeftBehind.net partly to substantiate to the conventional wisdom that the law disproportionately impacts Democratic voters.

"HAVA has been used to erect a series of barriers," Kennedy told MSNBC last week, "that make it really an obstacle course, particularly for African Americans to vote, for Hispanics to vote, for young people and old people."

The new registration requirements, in the finest tradition of racially and politically skewed motor voter laws, use prohibitively stringent ID requirements, including driver's licence requirements and "perfect match" rules that require every fact on all your government IDs to match when you register to vote.

BRADLEY EFFECT

Most years, a huge gap between pre-vote polling, exit poll results and official tallies would raise questions. But because of the speculation about the Bradley effect, whereby the black mayor of Los Angeles lost his bid for the California governorship 26 years ago after polls showed him ahead, the outcome some people envision when they say "narrow victory scenario" holds more than a faint hope.

When voters have cited issues other than race in their intention not to vote for Obama and the ones who do see race as an issue haven't been shy about it, a real Bradley effect would require an awful lot of backpedalling by an awful lot of people.

And covering suppression by selling a decades-old fable that race does matter to voters who've already said it doesn't would make what happened in Florida eight years ago look like a day at the beach.

Surely...we can be better than this!

Poll: Lingering racism may hurt Obama

updated 11:04 a.m. ET, Sat., Sept. 20, 2008

WASHINGTON - Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

'Less likely to vote for Obama'
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views.

Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.

"There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's only a few bigots," said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

Issue among Democrats
The findings suggest that Obama's problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.

The survey also focused on the racial attitudes of independent voters because they are likely to decide the election.

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.

Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.

On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn't be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites' views.

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

Three in 10 of those Democrats who don't trust Obama's change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.

Still, the effects of whites' racial views are apparent in the polling.

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

But in an election without precedent, it's hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play.

The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.

Other techniques used in the poll included recording people's responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks' troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike blacks.

"We still don't like black people," said John Clouse, 57, reflecting the sentiments of his pals gathered at a coffee shop in Somerset, Ohio.

Word association
Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites."

Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn't.

Among white independents, racial stereotyping is not uncommon. For example, while about 20 percent of independent voters called blacks "intelligent" or "smart," more than one third latched on the adjective "complaining" and 24 percent said blacks were "violent."

Nearly four in 10 white independents agreed that blacks would be better off if they "try harder."

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

The Clinton factor
Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people's votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Clinton's backers.

Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton's white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes.

The survey of 2,227 adults was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 5. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

ON DEADLINE: Bill Clinton is no brother

By SONYA ROSS | Associated Press Writer

Imagine, for just a minute, the pain of America's first black president.

Not Barack Obama - Bill Clinton.

That's about the only explanation for Clinton's lack of brotherly behavior lately: He's in pain.

He is a figurative black man watching an actual black man soak in all the love that black voters used to save for him.

Suddenly, he looks oh so white.

The former president's love affair with black America hasn't soured to the point that he'll be chased out of his office in Harlem. But black people might revoke Clinton's honorary brother card if, out of his pain, he keeps hating on Obama. He's treating the Illinois senator like an unworthy heir to his racial legacy.

At first, Clinton's slips of the lip about black voting habits and the like could be chalked up to election-year politics. Why wouldn't an ex-president try to cajole his party's most loyal voters into supporting his candidate of choice? Especially when that candidate is his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The problem is, nobody bothered to tell Clinton that honorary blackness is also temporary. No matter how much he's done on the subject of race, his brother privileges are always up for renewal.

Clinton learned this the hard way - by watching black people throw support to Obama en masse while kicking aside Hillary Clinton's complaints about the man. If anybody knows what Obama is doing to seduce black voters, it is Bill Clinton. After all, Clinton pushed the very same buttons to claim the black vote for himself when he first ran for the presidency 16 years ago.

"I think that they played the race card on me. We now know, from memos from the (Obama) campaign, that they planned it all along," Clinton groused to the aptly named radio station WHYY on the day before the Pennsylvania primary.

He did not produce the memos or any evidence that they exist, and the Obama campaign denies the accusation.

Still, Clinton accused the Illinois senator of putting an unfair spin on his comparison of Obama's South Carolina primary victory to Jesse Jackson's caucus wins there two decades earlier. Black leaders, black voters and most impartial observers in the media saw Clinton's remarks for what they were - a brazen attempt to marginalize Obama as a "black candidate."

What gets to Clinton, more than anything, is the fact that even black voters who question the Illinois senator's "blackness" still shield Obama against a slap from somebody outside the family - in this case, Clinton himself.

In a game of race cards, Obama wins.

"These were words that came out of his mouth," Obama said of Clinton, "not words that came out of mine."

Situations like this give blacks a firm impression that the Clintons "are committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to the point that he could never win," Rep. JimClyburn, D-S.C., told The New York Times.

"When he was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar," Clyburn said. "I think black folks feel strongly that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation."

Just days before the Pennsylvania primary, Obama dipped into the Clinton racial playbook of old when he blunted Hillary Clinton's attacks with a simple brush of his hand on his shoulder, mimicking rapper Jay-Z in his music video, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder." The gesture - clearly deliberate because Obama did it twice then grinned all big - spoke to black voters just like Clinton did in 1992 by playing a saxophone on "The Arsenio Hall Show" from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

The message then, and now, was, "I'm the one to vote for, black people, because I'm cool like that."

Clinton remembers a time when he could do no wrong in black people's eyes. Up until the day he left office seven years ago, most blacks agreed with author Toni Morrison's observation that Clinton was the nation's first black president because it would be hard to find anybody who could be blacker than Clinton and occupy the White House at the same time.

Along came Obama - who, ironically, is of mixed race - and immediately, Clinton lost his black street cred.

Even Morrison thought so. She clarified the first-black-president title she'd bestowed on Clinton, and embraced Obama.

While Clinton bellyaches about Obama's good fortunes with black people, Obama basks in the support of powerful blacks like billionaire Oprah Winfrey, who dared anybody to suggest her choice of candidates was purely a black thing.

"Don't play me small," she said.

It's Clinton who looks small. He continues to whine about the trouble he's caused himself.

"You got to really go some to play the race card with me," Clinton spewed on WHYY. "My office is in Harlem. And Harlem voted for Hillary, by the way."

Off mike, Clinton asked: "I don't think I have to take any (expletive) from anybody on that. Do you?"

Actually, sir, you do. But black people feel your pain.

---

EDITOR'S NOTE - Sonya Ross, a news editor in the AP's Washington bureau, was one of the few black White House reporters during the Clinton years.

Obama and Lincoln

By Bob Burnett | April 3, 2008 at 07:51:52

In his remarkable March 18th speech, A More Perfect Union, Democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, directly addressed the racial aspect of his campaign that, up until the preceding week, had largely been in the background. While the overt reason for the speech was the inflammatory remarks of Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, it also responded to right wing hate messages – recently picked up by the Clinton campaign, suggesting America isn't ready for a black President.

Polls indicate that 62 percent of Americans believe the U.S. will accept a black President. Nonetheless, since it became clear that Senator Obama was a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, many have suggested the poll results were a reflection of political correctness, as respondents didn't want to tell pollsters about their latent racism. And, as her desperate presidential campaign careens through Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton seems increasingly willing to suggest she is more electable than Obama because, while she may be a woman, she's the "right" color.

Residing in Berkeley, I know no one who admits to being a racist and none of my friends has said they won't vote for Obama because he's black. Nonetheless, I've had acquaintances volunteer that someone in their family, a close friend, or "the guys back home" would never vote for a black candidate for President. I'm curious to know who these people are. Perhaps they're the 13 percent of Americans identified in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll who believe Senator Obama is a Muslim. Or, they may be the 14 percent who responded they would have some reservations about making Obama the first African-American President. But, there could be a simpler explanation; these bigots may constitute a significant element in the 32 percent of Americans who approve of the job George W. Bush is doing as President: died-in-the-wool conservatives who are stuck in a dysfunctional way of viewing race, the Bush Administration, and our democracy.

These polls make clear there are two competing views of Barack Obama. Some see him exclusively as a black candidate and believe he has received preferential treatment to get where he is. Others see him as the embodiment of the American myth of the triumphant individual. Obama's life has many of the elements of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches fables: he was raised by his mother and grandmother, worked his way through college, became a community organizer, attended Harvard Law School and became the first black president of the Law Review, and returned to Chicago where he was a successful civil rights attorney and author before entering politics. His first book, "Dreams from My Father," is considered an American masterpiece.

Many observers note the parallels between Barack Obama's life and that of America's sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln. Both came from humble surroundings; Lincoln lost his mother when he was nine; Obama's father left when he was two. Both are tall, lawyers, and began their political careers in the Illinois legislature. Lincoln also wrote his own speeches.

Senator Obama knew his presidential campaign would hinge on his response to the videos of Reverend Wright's sermons, so he personally wrote the March 18th speech. Thus, the values and themes expressed in "A More Perfect Union" represent Obama's true beliefs.

His core message was contained in these lines: "Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have... white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many." "A More Perfect Union" was not restricted to the issue of race. It was Obama's prescription for a better America based upon a transformative politics of unity, a politics where, "all Americans... realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper." His speech was a call for a new populism, an appeal for Americans to unite against conservative policies that have divided us by race, gender, religion, and sexual preference in order to wage class warfare – to "favor the few over the many."

Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address concluded with an appeal to "the better angels of our nature" and Barack Obama has repeated this call. Indeed, many of the themes Lincoln sounded 148 years ago echo in Obama's speech: the need for Americans to remember the values of our Nation's founders – all men are created equal – and stand together against injustice. And like many of Lincoln's speeches, "A More Perfect Union" was an appeal for unity and reconciliation.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and Quaker actvist. He is particularly interested in progressive morality and writes frequently on the ethical aspects of political and social issues.

Alice Walker - "Lest We Forget ... An open letter to my sisters who are brave"

Sometimes, words are simply pure gospel ... this is the legacy of truth I want my daughters to know and embrace - zjm

Alice Walker

I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.

When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.

The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.

I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.

When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.

Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.

We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Namaste;

And with all my love,

Alice Walker

Cazul

Northern California

First Day of Spring

Mixed Like Me

Like Barack Obama, Marylanders of mixed race find that their heritage brings both opportunities and obstacles

"I had a hard time trying to figure out who I was," says Vicky Key, 20, a biracial student at the University of Maryland, College Park. (Sun photo by Andre' F. Chung / March 6, 2008

By Michael Hill | Sun Reporter
When Vicky Key looks at Barack Obama, she sees someone like her - not black, not white, but mixed.

"I feel for him," says Key, 20, a sophomore at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is active in the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association. "Because of being mixed, the issue comes up of if he is trying to be black or white. I face that challenge every day. People look at you and judge you by how you look."

As products of mixed-race marriages, Obama and Key are in a what appears to be a fast-growing segment of the American population. The 2000 Census was the first to allow people to choose more than one racial category to describe themselves and more than 7 million did just that - yet some experts say even that total is too low. "That's just the tip of the iceberg," says Matthew Garcia of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Obama's emergence could accelerate the challenge to accepted racial categories and lead to what social historians call a post-racial era, in politics and, indeed, in all of American life. Today, many multi-racial Americans are helping to forge that new era.

Brian Knight, a Baltimore lawyer, has not had problems with living in this state of flux.

"I was aware of what I was and wasn't growing up," says Knight, whose father is from the Caribbean, his mother from Germany. "In white European circles, it was clear I was not white. In African-American circles, I was not perceived as African-American. I was mostly mistaken as Hispanic. ... "

"I think you become aware that you kind of don't fit into these groups," he says. "I tended to be comfortable with anyone, anytime."

Warren Kelley, assistant vice president of student affairs at College Park and adviser of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, says this comfort level can give mixed-race people an advantage.

"We learn to deal competently with different cultures," says Kelley, who has a black father and a Japanese mother. He adds, "I think if you grow up in that kind of family, you see how malleable race is while everything in society treats race as a big, firm wall."

But Key says there is another side to that malleability. "I had a hard time trying to figure out who I was. People were always trying to tell me who I was supposed to be. It is hard to explain. I have gone through a lot of racial problems."

For decades, scientists such as sociologists and biologists have called race a social construct - categories created by societies to catalog people, rather than a biological fact. Experts note that many people have vested interests in those categories, so breaking them down may meet with resistance.

"I wish I could tell you I thought we were moving beyond these racial categories, but I think they are going to be with us for a long time," says Karen Kaufmann, an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

To many, Obama is the perfect point person for an assault on these categories. Not only was his mother a white women from Kansas and his father a Kenyan, but Obama had an Indonesian stepfather and spent some childhood years in that country.

Garcia, who teaches a class on multi-racialism at Brown, says it is significant that Obama's youthful years in the United States were spent in Hawaii.

"In some ways, his arrival on the national scene marks the integration of Hawaiian sensitivity about race and interracial relationships into the continental United States," he says. "The whole concept of multi-racialism is very alive in Hawaii. It is the norm in many ways."

Obama makes clear in his 1995 memoir, Dreams of My Father, that he chose an African-American identity - just as golfer Tiger Woods chooses to celebrate his panoply of racial identities. But others say the choice was not totally in his hands.

Early in his campaign, Kaufmann notes, Obama was often accused of not being black enough. "One of his defenses was to half-joke that he was black enough when he tried to hail a cab in New York City," she says.

That anecdote, she notes, shows that race "is about how people's appearances get played out in social and economic and political heirarchies. On paper, he may not be black, but he walks through life experiencing it as a black man. ... People come to see themselves as others see them."

Knight agrees. "I think there is a debate around whether or not you can pick your race. Tiger Woods and me and my siblings may try, but the fact is, clearly we are not white. And we still live in a society that adheres to the 'one-drop' rule,'" he says, referring to archaic laws that defined a black person as one with a single drop of black blood in his veins, or one black ancestor on the family tree.

Katrina Bell McDonald, a sociologist at the Johns Hopkins University, says her fellow African-Americans may have their own take on the Illinois senator.

"To me, he is just a black boy who has done well," she says. "He's got a good head on his shoulders, he's picked a good companion, he's done well and makes us proud.

"I don't see him as a mixed-race person at all. That said, I think Barack is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. His mixed ancestry works with some people, embodying the melting pot image they have in their heads."

James Glass, who studies the psychology of politics at College Park, says one can sense in Obama's speeches the possibility of his transcending traditional racial categories.

"In the way he puts politics together, his connection with the audience, race has no meaning," he says.

"With him, people don't think they are seeing a political leader who is African-American, or a political leader who is half-white and half-African-American; they are seeing a political leader who articulates a point of view that encompassses the audience's intelligence."

That is what Knight sees in Obama, a politician who excites voters not because he is African-American, but because he has ideas that resonate with the American public.

"I think it is a generational issue," Knight says of Obama's appeal as a post-baby boomer candidate. "At least that is how he speaks to me personally. ... But almost every story about him has in its first few lines the extent of the African-American turnout.

"It makes me chuckle - as if that matters in Idaho and Minnesota and places like that. It's as if the journalists are stuck in that old analysis mode, are not sure how to handle this campaign."

Key of the University of Maryland thinks an Obama presidency would change views of race and biracialism. "I just hope people can look past his race and judge him on what he is trying to do for the country, while, at the same time, he can be a role model for minorities."

Yet traditional racial categories are very stubborn. They are embedded in laws designed to counter previous discrimination. In many cases, minority leaders opposed allowing people to declare more than one race on Census forms.

"Many traditional Democratic Party supporters hold onto very rigid racial definitions," Garcia says. "It has all sorts of implications for the way voting districts are construed, the way support for education is doled out, the way people are regarded when they come into schools, and such."

Parks says it is more than the law. "People still have emotional connections to these categories."

And often these categories do have meaning beyond the social construct. Ronald Walters says students in his racial politics class at the University of Maryland assumed race was obsolete.

"But when Katrina came along, the students were absolutely floored," he says of seeing so many black people clearly treated differently than whites. "They couldn't handle it because it was outside their frame of reference; they were not used to thinking in those racial terms.

Still, Garcia says the lingering emotional connection people have for racial categories might be beginning to die out.

"Young people have a very different sense of what race is in America," he says. "In their world, borrowing on my own experiences, the next generation is connecting with the idea that race is much more fluid than black and white, they are embracing the idea of multi-racialism."

'But most of all, it depends on you.'

Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2008 | By Joe Klein

"I can no more disown [the Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother," Barack Obama said in the most powerful sentence of his extraordinary speech about race on March 18 in Philadelphia, "a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me ... 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."

Too often in this campaign, Obama's rhetoric has been gorgeous but abstract, ear candy for the educated. But this simple statement, equating his black surrogate father and his white surrogate mother, was something any fair-minded person could understand: almost every one of us has an uncle or a grandmother good for at least two jaw-droppers every Thanksgiving. Yes, the Senator was comparing apples and freight trains: Wright's hate speech was as public and consequential as the grandmother's stereotypes were private, but Obama came to this comparison only after he had unequivocally condemned his pastor for having "a profoundly distorted view of this country."

The rhetorical magic of the speech—what made it extraordinary—was that it was, at once, both unequivocal and healing. There were no weasel words, no Bushian platitudes or Clintonian verb-parsing. Obama was unequivocal in his candor about black anger and white resentment—sentiments that few mainstream politicians acknowledge (although demagogues of both races have consistently exploited them). And he was unequivocal in his refusal to disown Wright. Cynics and political opponents quickly noted that Obama used a forest of verbiage to camouflage a correction—the fact that he was aware of Wright's views, that he had heard such sermons from the pulpit, after first denying that he had. And that may have been politics as usual. But the speech wasn't.

It was a grand demonstration of the largely unfulfilled promise of Obama's candidacy: the possibility that, given his eloquence and intelligence, he will be able to create a new sense of national unity—not by smoothing over problems but by confronting them candidly and with civility. Unfortunately, that hasn't always been the case. In recent weeks, he has been boggled twice by policy advisers who have been caught in the act of telling difficult truths—on trade and Iraq—that the candidate himself denied on the campaign trail. Perhaps now, having learned how cathartic truth-telling can be, Obama will summon the courage to tell Pennsylvania audiences that free-trade agreements like NAFTA have only a marginal impact on the loss of manufacturing jobs and that it will be impossible to end the war in Iraq in 16 months.

What, if any, impact will the speech have on the campaign? Probably not as much as it should. It was delivered in the morning, to a minuscule television audience. It deserved a full hearing, but most Americans heard it in sound bites and from headlines—and I imagine that for more than a few, the headline will be 'Obama Refuses To Disown His Anti-American Pastor.' This is where inexperience really hurts—not Obama's inexperience but the public's inexperience with him. For many Americans, the Wright flap is the third thing they've learned about Obama. The first two were that he is black and has a "funny" name. All too many voters don't get beyond first impressions, but it's not impossible. In 1992 the first thing most Americans learned about Bill Clinton was that he'd been shagging a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers. The second was that he'd avoided the military draft during Vietnam. But Clinton—a politician as extraordinary as Obama—managed to survive and, intermittently, prosper.

Whether Obama survives now will depend on the most important and overlooked part of his speech—the final section, in which he challenged the public and, especially, the media to stow the sensationalism: "We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day ... and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words," he said. "But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election we'll be talking about some other distraction ... And nothing will change ... Or, at this moment in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.'"

And that is the existential challenge of 2008: whether we will have a big election or a small one. Will we have a serious conversation about the enormous problems confronting the country—the wars, the economic crisis, the looming environmental cataclysm—or will we allow the same-old carnival of swift boats and sound bites? The answer depends on the candidates, of course, and on the media—where cynicism too often passes for insight. But most of all, it depends on you.

Superdelegates Await Impact Of Obama Race Speech

It is imperative that we all begin contacting our elected representatives and other superdelegates - encourage them to vote for conscience and change - encourage them to vote for Obama. zjm

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The Wall Street Journal reports that after Sen. Barack Obama's "race-relations speech this week," the remaining "fence-sitters" among the Democratic superdelegates are waiting to "see how their constituents react to his attempts to soothe racial tension." Superdelegates are "watching to see whether the senator's oratory will assuage white voters outraged at Internet videos showing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. suggesting that America be damned for its treatment of blacks. Separately, many worry that black voters will be outraged by a sense that Sen. Obama is being unfairly judged."

The Washington Post reports the "question is which will last longer -- Obama's eloquent words about racial divisions and reconciliation or questions about his relationship with a man whose words have shocked the country." In his column in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz says, "On the nightly newscasts and in the morning papers, many journalists did try to grapple with the complexity of Obama's Tuesday address about the roots of racial tension. But when the story hit the Cuisinart of talk-show debate, it got whipped into a single question: Did Obama adequately distance himself from the radioactive reverend? Not surprisingly, most liberals loved the speech and many conservatives -- though not all -- lambasted it."

Obama said on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, "In some ways, this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional candidates. And if I bring something to this conversation, it's going to be because I do what I did yesterday, which is hopefully open up a new conversation about a new direction in the country."

Obama's Lincoln Moment

From the Los Angeles Times

Never before has a candidate for national office spoken so frankly about race in America.

Tim Rutten March 19, 2008

One hundred and fifty years ago this June, a lanky Illinois lawyer turned politician gave a speech that changed the way Americans talked about the great racial issues of their day.

The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln, and the speech was the famous "House Divided" address with which he accepted the Republican Party's nomination as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas, but the address changed the national conversation on slavery and, two years later, Lincoln was on his way from Springfield to the White House.

America's political story is studded with such addresses -- historical signposts that divide that which went before from all that followed on an issue of crucial national importance. Franklin Roosevelt's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" speech fundamentally changed Americans' expectations of their government in times of social and economic crisis. John F. Kennedy's address on Catholicism and politics to the Greater Houston Ministerial Assn. in 1960 forever altered the way we think about religion and public office.

Sen. Barack Obama, another lanky lawyer from Illinois, planted one of those rhetorical markers in the political landscape Tuesday, when he delivered his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia, near Independence Hall. The address was meant to dampen the firestorm of criticism that has attached itself to the senator's campaign since video clips of race-baiting remarks by his Chicago church's former pastor began circulating last week.

But instead of offering a simple exercise in damage control, Obama chose to place his discussion of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's incendiary comments in a wider consideration of race in America -- and the results were, like those Kennedy achieved in Houston, historic.

Just as every seasoned political hand in 1960 knew that, sooner or later, Kennedy would have to tackle the question of his Catholicism head-on, it's been clear for some time that Obama would have to speak explicitly to the question of race in this campaign. Still, polished orator that he may be, no one could have predicted an address of quite this depth and scope.

"That was the most sophisticated speech on race and politics I've ever heard," said CNN's Bill Schneider, the only network pundit who actually has taught American political history at elite universities.

It was all the more remarkable because, while Kennedy presided over what may have been the greatest speech-writing team in electoral history, Obama -- like Lincoln -- wrote his address himself, completing the final draft Monday night.

Obama did what he had to do, unequivocally repudiating Wright's extreme rhetoric. But what was truly radical about his analysis was his implicit demand that black and white Americans accept the imperfection of each other's views on race. Embedded in such acceptance is the seed of that "more perfect union" toward which this country -- unquestionably great but itself imperfect -- must strive.

It was a concept that Obama subtly invoked near the beginning of the speech by pointing to the fact that although the Constitution "was stained by the original sin of slavery," the "answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution -- a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time."

Theologically, original sin is the source of man's fallen nature and the root of his imperfection. Obama went on to build on that concept, invoking the authority of his own mixed heritage -- son of a black immigrant father and white mother, raised by a loving white grandmother -- and refusing to reject either Wright, a man of good works as well as extreme rhetoric, or his loving grandmother, who was prone to racial stereotypes. Obama demanded that black anger make an allowance for white anxiety and that white resentment make a place for black grievance.

No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly or realistically about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America. As he put it Tuesday, "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

A Moving Moment in our Nation's History

March 19, 2008

Are we listening, America? On Tuesday morning, Barack Obama delivered the speech of his life about the most divisive issue in America in this day or any day -- race. He spoke for millions of Americans of good will and open minds -- Americans who have struggled to find just these words -- challenging us to heal our painful racial wounds by first admitting the deep roots, complexities and truths of our grievances. The grievances of black America are not imaginary, he said. And the anger and frustrations within segments of the white community cannot always be dismissed as bigotry.

Speaking to white Americans, Obama said, "The path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people."

But speaking to African Americans, Obama had this to say about resentful white people: "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 ... when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

Until all of us come to understand this more tangled truth about race in America and "work through" it, as Obama said, we will never seriously take on the great problems that trouble us all.

"If we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners," Obama said, "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."

In the last two weeks, issues arose on the campaign trail that threatened to recast Obama as "the black candidate" rather than as a candidate who happens to be black (and white, for that matter). Most alarming were the indisputably objectionable remarks of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Race moved to centerstage and was seized on by some to confuse and divide us. So Obama, in that exceptional way he has of brushing aside polemics, stepped up to a podium in Philadelphia and challenged us to see all the shades of gray, to embrace our greater and shared humanity.

It was a moving moment in American history to hear a man who could be president dissect the rancorous matter of race with such candor, and it called to mind other piercing addresses by the likes of FDR, Kennedy and King.

Obama's speech won't sway everybody -- within two hours Rush Limbaugh was sneering that Rodney King said it just as well with "Why can't we all just get along." But among those Americans who sincerely yearn for relief from the divisive and diversionary politics of the last couple of decades, this was a speech to move the head and heart.

Running for president inevitably is an act of self-revelation, and with this speech Obama peeled off many more layers and revealed something close to his true essence. He is the man in the middle, bi-racial and bi-cultural, inclined by both nurture and nature to understand if not always forgive both sides. He rightly denounced the many offensive comments by Rev. Wright, yet he refused to disown Wright or his overall message of self-determination.

"I can no longer disown him than I can disown the black community," Obama said. "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 ... who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

What American does not see his own family and community -- and perhaps himself -- in that confession?

Obama on Tuesday spoke to our better angels.

And maybe America moved a little.

Invited to Wrestle in a Racial Mud Pit, Obama Soars Above It - The Washington Post

By Courtland Milloy, Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Before Barack Obama took to the podium yesterday, I was pretty angry at how slimy the presidential campaign had become. And my plan was to write a screed about those whites who want Obama to "transcend race" while they get to hold on to their racist ways.

In the latest episode, inflammatory snippets of sermons by Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ Church in Chicagp, had been fashioned into a political bombshell by Obama's opponents. Right-wing TV commentators then detonated it with ignorant vitriol, including an insinuation by Pat Buchanan that Wright was a black David Duke, the former leader of the white terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, and that Obama was the disciple of a hateful man.

I could go on and on.

Then Obama spoke, and I had a mind-altering experience. After hearing him deliver what was essentially a treatise on faith, hope and charity, I no longer wanted to risk getting stuck in a racial tar pit with Buchanan or any of the others. I just wanted to hop on that Obama bandwagon and head for new America.

The desire to rise up out of the racial muck was intensified with every conversation I had about the speech.

Rep. Elijah E Cummings (D-Md.), who co-chairs the Maryland for Obama campaign, hit the nail on the head when he told me: "Obama has the ability to elevate our thinking beyond the chicken-yard scratching and biting. He calls on us to soar like eagles. And if he can't always take you there, he can sure dare you to go."

Edwin Chapman, an African American physician who lives in Mitchellville, said: "The big challenge for Obama was not to be portrayed as the black candidate and not to be perceived as denying his blackness. It would not have worked if he had done like Tiger Woods and called himself a 'cablinasian.' It worked because Obama came off as a Renaissance man."

Another friend, Sidney Strickland, an African American attorney and co-founder of a bank in Laurel, said: "He spoke frankly about the racial divide, the gap in black and white perceptions of reality. And because of his personal story, rooted in having a black father and white mother, he was able to offer himself as the bridge."

Yet, as Obama made clear in the speech, the racial gap is huge, and it would be a stretch indeed for anyone to even imagine that it could be spanned entirely by one man in a lifetime. He certainly knew about the breadth of the gap inside my head.

"Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race and racism continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways," he said. "The memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness. . . . That anger is not always productive. Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems. . . . But the anger is real, it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm."

Then Obama went on to say something that almost made me audaciously hopeful. He had the courage to connect slavery to black suffering today.

"Many of the disparities that exist . . . can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation," he said. He went on to connect the achievement gap with the legacy of inferior, racially segregated schools that still haven't been fixed "50 years after Brown versus Board of Education."

He noted that legalized discrimination had prevented blacks from owning property or getting jobs or loans to purchase homes. The result has been the inability of countless blacks to accumulate wealth and pass on the benefits to their children. Obama linked a lack of economic opportunity to crime and poverty.

Of course, some still could not handle the truth. Brit Hume of Fox News, for instance, thought Obama was "blaming whites" -- even though Obama specifically called on African Americans to take responsibility for their lives.

That was enough to make me want to wallow in the muck again. But Obama had made a point that was bigger than Hume or Buchanan or even himself. To get where you need to go, you've got to know where you came from. And even if Obama doesn't make it all the way to the White House, I sure like where he's taken me so far.

Washington Post: Obama's Road Map on Race

By Eugene Robinson Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Once again, the conventional wisdom proved stunningly unwise. Barack Obama was supposed to be on his heels, forced into a backpedaling, defensive crouch after racially charged remarks by his former pastor, delivered from the pulpit years ago, suddenly became the hottest story of the presidential campaign. But instead of running away, Obama issued a challenge to those who would exploit the issue of race: Bring it on.

Yesterday morning, in what may be remembered as a landmark speech regardless of who becomes the next president, Obama established new parameters for a dialogue on race in America that might actually lead somewhere -- that might break out of the sour stasis of grievance and countergrievance, of insensitivity and hypersensitivity, of mutual mistrust.

"My goal was to try to lift up some truth that people talk about privately but don't always talk about publicly between the races," Obama told me in a telephone interview later in the day. He delivered his speech, titled "A More Perfect Union," in Philadelphia just yards from Independence Hall.

As expected, Obama categorically denounced the incendiary sound bites from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons that have been played endlessly on cable television in recent days. Wright displayed "a profoundly distorted view of this country," Obama said in his speech, "a view that sees white racism as endemic."

But Obama didn't stop there. He went on to specify what was wrong with Wright's preaching about racism in the United States: "It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

The consensus among the commentariat was that Obama, as a matter of political tactics, should want to shift the conversation away from the subject of race as quickly as possible. He told me that the decision not to turn away, but to give a major speech on the issue, was his.

"What was fascinating over the last three or four days was to see how Reverend Wright's admittedly offensive comments . . . were packaged in sound bites in a way that didn't contribute to understanding between black and white Americans but only expanded the chasm between them," he said. "I thought it was both a challenge and an opportunity to use this moment to describe, to black and white, why there is this chasm."

And that may have been the most significant aspect of the speech: the fact that Obama proposed a conversation, not a monologue. He not only laid out the reasons some African Americans might feel alienated or resentful but also the reasons some white Americans might feel the same way.

"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," Obama said in the speech. "Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything, they built it from scratch. . . . 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 . . . when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

These resentments have "helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation," Obama told his audience. "And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns -- this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding."

Obama called on African Americans to embrace "the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past," and to take "full responsibility for our own lives." And he's absolutely right.

This amounts to a new set of talking points for a discussion about race: Don't be paralyzed by history but acknowledge its effects. Recognize that whites have legitimate grievances that are not racist. Don't cling to victimhood as an all-purpose excuse. Accept personal responsibility.

Obama told me that he doesn't intend to make race a major theme of his campaign. "I don't think that we are going to be gnawing on this bone at every stop," he said. But I believe he might have pulled off something that seemed almost impossible: He not only ventured into the minefield of race and made it back alive, but he also marked a path for the rest of us to follow.

Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage

March 19, 2008

Editorial

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.

Mr. Obama had to address race and religion, the two most toxic subjects in politics. He was as powerful and frank as Mitt Romney was weak and calculating earlier this year in his attempt to persuade the religious right that his Mormonism is Christian enough for them.

It was not a moment to which Mr. Obama came easily. He hesitated uncomfortably long in dealing with the controversial remarks of his spiritual mentor and former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who denounced the United States as endemically racist, murderous and corrupt.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama drew a bright line between his religious connection with Mr. Wright, which should be none of the voters’ business, and having a political connection, which would be very much their business. The distinction seems especially urgent after seven years of a president who has worked to blur the line between church and state.

Mr. Obama acknowledged his strong ties to Mr. Wright. He embraced him as the man “who helped introduce me to my Christian faith,” and said that “as imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me.”

Wisely, he did not claim to be unaware of Mr. Wright’s radicalism or bitterness, disarming the speculation about whether he personally heard the longtime pastor of his church speak the words being played and replayed on YouTube. Mr. Obama said Mr. Wright’s comments were not just potentially offensive, as politicians are apt to do, but “rightly offend white and black alike” and are wrong in their analysis of America. But, he said, many Americans “have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.”

Mr. Obama’s eloquent speech should end the debate over his ties to Mr. Wright since there is nothing to suggest that he would carry religion into government. But he did not stop there. He put Mr. Wright, his beliefs and the reaction to them into the larger context of race relations with an honesty seldom heard in public life.

Mr. Obama spoke of the nation’s ugly racial history, which started with slavery and Jim Crow, and continues today in racial segregation, the school achievement gap and discrimination in everything from banking services to law enforcement.

He did not hide from the often-unspoken reality that people on both sides of the color line are angry. “For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation,” he said, “the memories of humiliation and fear have not gone away, nor the anger and the bitterness of those years.”

At the same time, many white Americans, Mr. Obama noted, do not feel privileged by their race. “In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game,” he said, adding that both sides must acknowledge that the other’s grievances are not imaginary.

He made the powerful point that while these feelings are not always voiced publicly, they are used in politics. “Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition,” he said.

Against this backdrop, he said, he could not repudiate his pastor. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” That woman whom he loves deeply, he said, “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street” and more than once “uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

There have been times when we wondered what Mr. Obama meant when he talked about rising above traditional divides. This was not such a moment.

We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.