Political, Moral Courage

It's quite impressive that Senator Barack Obama chose to address the simmering, always underlying issue of race relations in the United States. Confronting head-on the unspoken but always-present skeleton in the nation's closet. And doing so with firm conviction, with unwavering honesty, expressing his position from both sides of the conflict. Indicating his ability to see things in the round, from the perspective of each "side".

It was quite the performance, and it deserves applause. Who could argue with his challenge that "...We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as a spectacle . . . or as fodder for the nightly news. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time'." This is bold collective ownership of a stridently uncomforting problem facing America.

This was his direct response to the criticism of the United States by his long-time spiritual adviser, tainting, by association, Senator Obama's political candidacy. With compelling, elevating rhetoric he faced the problem square on. Appealing to his supporters not to desert him on the basis of his long-time alliance with a black religious leader succumbing to traditional aggrievement against white intolerance.

Everyone wants to be a part of the vision of inclusion, equality, brotherhood. If a man of the cloth can be obsessed about religion, yet so pathologically committed to denouncing the race that victimized his own, has he really absorbed the lessons of Christ? If his apprehension of history's wrongs remain written in stone, can his comprehension of the first order of Christ be so admirable? This is an expression, an understandable one, of one-dimensional politics.

It's a fine line Senator Obama wove between his admiration for his long-time preacher's sermons in Christ, and his dismissal of that same man's politics and social underpinnings. When he appealed to his supporters to understand the polarity between his Christian commitment and his old friend, as opposed to his political-social conscience, his language soared.

Describing Reverend Wright as a black pastor of the old school whose racially divisive remarks made for "a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic", he hit a nerve of compassionate understanding. For the truth quite simply is, white racism was endemic within U.S. society; only now gradually, over the decades, emerging from the sinister depths of white souls.

Make that black souls as well, for there too existed - and still exists - a rampant racist view of one's fellow countrymen. This works both ways. But the black grievance had its genesis in the history of real - and sometimes still present - racial disharmony expressed in inhumane treatment of people based on the colour of their skin. It's been neatly turned about, as a self-supporting response.

As for the circumstances that bred both the white and the black racism, it is slowly fading into the distant past. Resentment about that past cannot be quickly stamped out, only gradually ameliorated. "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 of misunderstanding that exists between the races", said Mr. Obama.

Bravo.