The Racial Question is Catching UpWith Barack Obama

In reacting to the attacks from the Republican camp, the Democratic senator took a risk by playing the victim.

A century and a half after the abolition of slavery, and forty-five years after Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, America has not yet resolved its Black problem. Looming, the racial question comes back today to the front of the stage, threatening to poison the electoral campaign.

In Missouri last Wednesday, Barack Obama reacted to negative publicity from the Republican campaign which compared him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He declared: “Since Bush and McCain don’t have any proposals to resolve the problems of America, their tactic is trying to make you afraid of me. You know, their only message has become, ‘this guy is not a true patriot, he has a funny name, and he doesn’t look like all the other presidents that you see on the dollar bills. He represents a risk.'”

Just for once, the Democratic candidate has gone a little bit too far in this victimization. Right away, Rick Davis, the director of the John McCain campaign jumped on the occasion to denounce Obama’s use of the “race card”: “This sows division in the country, it is negative, it is shameful, it is wrong.” The Republicans, who have to their credit, the successive appointment of two Black individuals (Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) to the position of Secretary of State, are not hung-up by the racial question.

Feeling that the ground is shifting, the Democratic candidate’s campaign staff tried to calm the game, denying that Obama had accused McCain of basing his campaign on the skin color of his opponent. “The goal of this race to the presidency is the get rid of enormous challenges: an economy in recession, a foreign policy in tatters, an energy crisis affecting the entire world except for the big oil companies,” clarified Robert Gibbs, spokesperson of the Democratic campaign. “Barack Obama never believed that McCain desired to use the racial question in his campaign, but he thinks that the Republicans have resorted to old political tricks to distract the attention of the public from the true issues. Obama, himself, has the intention of focusing his campaign exclusively on the latter.” Period.

But against his will, the Illinois senator was caught up this weekend by the racial question. A meeting that he held in Florida was suddenly interrupted by three young black men waving a banner that read: “Obama, what are you doing for Blacks in America?” At the end of his speech, the Democratic candidate gave them the floor. The topic of the interrupters: the Black community seems to be the prime victim of the aggressiveness of banks, which are systematically taking over the homes of insolvent borrowers.

Not a big supporter of affirmative action

Cleverly, the Democratic candidate recognized the reality of the problem stemming from the sub-prime crisis and the past irresponsibility of lending organizations, but he didn’t let himself be caught up in the racial question. “What I propose, is to resolve with everyone together, Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, the problems that we have in America, OK?”

In his past experience as a community organizer in poor neighborhoods of Chicago, where he also dealt with the poverty of white working-class families affected by unemployment, Obama retained that the social problems in America were not summed up by the racial question. He is not a diehard supporter of affirmative action at colleges based on skin color. He recently affirmed that it would be unfair that his two daughters “born in a privileged environment,” benefit from it, rather than “poor white children.”

Obama, an alum of Harvard (like his Kenyan father), was not raised in a protesting racial culture. His skin color was never a problem for him. But in a subliminal and unacknowledged way, it remains so for America, even if we don’t yet know how this will affect voters.