How they see us: Failing to transcend race

The first nomination of a black man for president of the United States is at risk of being derailed

The first nomination of a black man for president of the United States is at risk of being derailed—by another black man, said Paul Sheehan in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. The rest of the world has long looked to the U.S. as a model, if an imperfect one, of a multiethnic society. By now, we all thought, “America should be entering the fifth phase of the evolution of its black population—slavery, segregation, civil rights, affirmative action, and, finally, equality.” But in the past few weeks, the candidacy of Barack Obama has been severely hurt by his links to a controversial black preacher. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is notorious for preaching that the U.S. is a terrorist nation that invented AIDS to kill blacks. Rather than helping Obama by recanting “this absurdity,” Wright instead repeated it “in a credibility meltdown that revealed him, before a national television audience, as a deluded narcissist.” Now Obama has been sinking in the polls, and he has the black preacher to blame.

Wright has merely exposed the anger that has lurked in black America all along, said Marc Hujer and Cordula Meyer in Germany’s Der Spiegel. “Thousands of black ministers across America preach similar sentiments Sunday after Sunday.” They say that God is on the side of the oppressed, and that in America, it is blacks who are oppressed. The tone is angry, resentful, victimized—quite different from “that of Oprah Winfrey or Bill Cosby, blacks who know how to talk to whites so as not to frighten them.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us