JC
The Los Angeles Times talks race with Senator Barack Obama. The interviewer assumes that Barack will have a hard time should he ever decide to run for the US Presidency, due to the things he discloses in his memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. In this book originally published before he began his political career, he discusses his rebellious, drug experimenting years, as well as the anger he felt when it came to issues of race.

In the book, he cringes when black friends play the race card to summon white guilt. And he seethes over whites’ mindless bigotry — their “particular brand of arrogance” — that breeds bitterness and self-hatred among blacks. But although the pain, frustration and anger he expresses will resonate among minorities, his candor will discomfort others by illuminating what Obama calls “the fissures of race.”

It’s a subject Obama insists Americans need to talk about more, not less. So we talked:
Opinion: Won’t voters have trouble reconciling your warm and fuzzy performance at last year’s Democratic National Convention with the “race man” this book reveals?

Obama: I don’t see any contradiction at all. What I was affirming in my speech at the convention was an aspiration, an idea of America, the notion that at its best America can be an enormous land of opportunity…. But it’s also a vision that has to be earned through hard work … in the same way I earned in that book a sense of resolution between the white half of me and the black half of me. It didn’t happen by ignoring these subterranean issues, but because I struggled and made mistakes and tried to be honest.

The same is true for this country…. What makes us special is that we confront — in a much more direct way than other countries have — the whole [question] of “how do you stitch together a heterogeneous society?”