Obama and the ghosts of racism

The Boston Globe
By James Carroll
January 7, 2008

"THEY SAID this day would never come," Barack Obama declared in Iowa last week, and the ghosts of this nation nodded. With an African-American competing seriously for the presidency of the United States, the last act of a centuries-old drama begins. Obama's blood tie to the story of American slavery, ironically, comes through his white mother's ancestry, which apparently includes both slave owners and those who fought for the Union to end slavery. That Obama's father was a Kenyan links him more directly than anyone could have imagined both to Africa's past as an exploited continent, and to its present, where the bloody legacy of colonialism plays itself out. (Obama's father was a member of the Luo tribe, like Raila Odinga, the leader of the Kenyan opposition, whose people are protesting the recent election.)
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In the American memory, slavery and then the war to abolish it are taken to be the two poles of the story, but it isn't that simple. If racial injustice continued to be a hallmark of life in the United States, it was thought to be an inevitable, but essentially unchosen consequence of the "250 years of unrequited toil," in Abraham Lincoln's phrase, that were imposed on kidnapped Africans and their descendants. Nearly a million Americans died in the war to end slavery, and - still in the American memory - the nation has felt badly ever since that slavery's hangover includes discrimination against black people to this day.
The conventional wisdom, given powerful articulation a generation ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is that the plight of African-Americans - from broad family dysfunction, to almost unshakeable poverty, to disproportionate incarceration rates of black males - is a tragic consequence of the social evil that America nobly renounced in the mid-19th century. Black people are socially disadvantaged, according to this narrative, because of the unhealed wound that was inflicted on them across the early centuries. Innately equal, yes, but they have been made a crippled people, which accounts for their still inferior position.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/07/obama_and_the_ghosts_of_racism/]