From the NEw York TImes columnist (South African by birth)Roger Cohen, in an interesting analysis called "Beyond America's Original Sin":


"...A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama's pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America's "original sin." Of course, "the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow" lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.

Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black "anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush's menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America's hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama's grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can. ..."


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