Obama words help soothe wounds of division

No one more than a black person in America wishes he could wave a magic wand and rid this country of the vestiges of its “original sin of slavery.”

But we better not be caught talking about our past or the racial problems of the present that compel us to live like masked men and women. Instead, we are all ordered to “get along” in denial.

That’s unless your bias is in lock step with the unsubstantiated statements shouted daily by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and sometimes on the Sabbath by ministers like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Yet the double standard that forces most black Americans to flee, fight or try to rise above always resurfaces to knock them off the tightrope that they, like Sen. Barack Obama, walk daily.

All races should heed the racial reconciliation speech Mr. Obama delivered in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

“We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together,” he said. So move toward “a more perfect union” by taking a different political path “this time.”

“For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. … Or at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ‘Not this time,’ ” Mr. Obama said.

“This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected,” he said.

My Catholic University journalism students this semester, all of them young and white, view race-baiting rhetoric from Geraldine Ferraro, Mr. Wright and others as coming from “relics.”

“The problem is that the past is the past and it cannot be changed, but people can change and grow to have a more educated and worldly opinion,” writes one student, who describes herself as a registered Republican but counts herself among the “youth of America” energized by the Obama campaign.

The Obama speech conveyed the silent anger and anguish felt by many blacks up and down the socioeconomic ladder. And they wonder how the issue of race got so turned on its head that it has become solely the responsibility of blacks to remedy.

Why should that awesome American burden fall to Mr. Obama, born of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas?

The candidate’s poignant memories of cringing at comments uttered by a white grandmother and a black pastor, both considered family to him, demonstrate that he was able to determine right from wrong and to overcome society’s divisive obstacles.

Still, we are steeped in “the struggle” the struggle to be free of the shackles, the whip, the rope, the burning cross, the Jim Crow laws, the water hoses and the insidious signs of prejudice and discrimination that are harder to uproot. There is the modern-day muzzle to speak not of evil or wrongdoing.

You cannot explain what people do not care to hear. A cynic asks, “Why bother? You’ll be misinterpreted and misrepresented anyway, like Mr. Obama.”

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