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: