Opinion: Barack Obama and the thorny issue of race
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Earlier this week, Geraldine Ferraro lost her spot as a Hillary Clinton fundraiser after offering her unvarnished take on the role race has played in Barack Obama‘s political rise. The coverage led a reader to direct us to an assessment of race and Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate.
The source is what caught our eye. It’s a 2005 Chicago Tribune profile. Posted on his Senate website. A key passage:
‘We have a certain script in our politics, and one of the scripts for black politicians is that for them to be authentically black they have to somehow offend white people,’ Obama said in an interview. ‘And then if he puts a multiracial coalition together, he must somehow be compromising the efforts of the African-American community. ‘To use a street term,’ he added, ‘we flipped the script.’ In winning the Democratic Senate primary in Illinois, Obama drew as many as two white votes for every black one, showing nearly unprecedented crossover appeal for a black candidate in a statewide race. Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race. If he were white, he once bluntly noted, he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. Or would he have been elected at all?
-- Scott Martelle
