Racial issues loom in US vote

Decades after the struggle against racial segregation, the race issue still pervades politics as Barack Obama fights to prove the United States is ready for a black president, observers say.

“The race card is on the table in this election and it is not coming off,” wrote the US political news website Politico. The Illinois senator has quashed the notion that his race — his father was a black man from Kenya, his mother a white woman from Kansas — would hold him back in competing for the Democratic nomination for president.

He stormed to victory in the party’s key first nominating state of Iowa before being narrowly beaten in New Hampshire by former first lady Hillary Clinton.

With Obama’s face on the cover, Newsweek magazine recently hailed him as offering a “new chapter” for the United States, in a contest where Democratic candidates have campaigned hard on the theme of change.

Obama “offers a vision attempting to lead the US beyond racial divisions, beyond class, beyond race and put together coalitions of people who would be able to put people together, able to change things,” said Ron Walters, a professor of political and African-American affairs at Maryland University.

Obama is not the first black American to run for president, but at 46 he is considered untainted by the tensions of the era of civil rights protests, and has benefited from the advances they promoted.

As the only black member of the US Senate and a graduate of the prestigious universities Columbia and Harvard, where he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, he seems to have breached racial divides.

Washington, Wednesday, AFP