Years before Barack Obama enraptured the nation by pronouncing at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America,” he compared the oppression of minorities in Los Angeles to the oppression of minority groups in Bosnia. He did so in this interview, which he gave to ‘Eye on Books,’ in August of 1995. At the 9:18 mark, he says:
There’s more language that raises an eyebrow as well. Near the end of the interview (at the 12:29 mark), he calls for ‘shared responsibility.’ But in doing so he fingers white executives in the suburbs as the prime culprit in the failure of inner-city schools. These racists in the suburbs are apparently the ones ‘suppressing other groups in the interest of power or greed:’
Are Bosnia and Africa really comparable to Los Angeles in the way that “one group [tries] to suppress another group in the interest of power or greed or resources or what have you?” Are the white executives of San Marino and the San Fernando Valley really comparable to Slobodan Milosevic? Listening to the entire interview, you see in Obama an admirable desire to overcome some of the racial divisions in this country. But to do that you need an understanding of what those divisions are. And if Obama really believes that white people are basically trying to keep black people down ‘in the interest of power or greed,’ it’s hard to see how his path leads toward healing.
