Obama and Color

The message of Barack Obama rests on two themes: hope and unity. For the months that he traveled across America at the mercy of the Democratic primaries, he knew to avoid the obstacles in order to impose his drive, the one of a country able to chase out its old demons, and to finally surpass its political and racial fractures. At almost every meeting, he became a master in the art of delivering what the press calls his “stump speech”, a campaign speech that hardly varies and is articulated around this vast project of a new nation with mew values. For months, the Illinois senator knowingly refused to put on the suit that his adversaries desire to cut out for him–the first being Hillary Clinton–the one of the “Black Candidate”. The label, he repeated, is not suitable to him because it corresponds to a past America, curled up on its divisions. Nevertheless, no one is surprised to see the “racial factor” at the heart of the presidential race. For long weeks, the conservatives of all kinds pertinently knew that the very controversial interventions of Obama’s extremist pastor would provide them ammunition to again launch the “war of color” in a country still haunted by the remains of segregation. All of Obama’s merit is to have known to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright and to have maintained his calling in favor of a “post racial” nation in Philadelphia. It’s up to the Democrats first, and perhaps the Americans later, to decide if they are ready to follow him on this road.