DRAWING ELOQUENTLY on the experience of his own background, Barack Obama yesterday confronted America's racial divisions in the most sweeping speech on the issue by any major US politician for a generation.
Speaking in Philadelphia, Mr Obama, who has until now insisted that his candidacy was not about race, warned that it had begun to divide Democrats dangerously. And, although repudiating some reported comments of his own former pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright, Mr Obama refused to dissociate himself from his mentor, insisting that the issue had to be confronted.
Locating his presidential candidacy within the struggle for racial justice that led from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement, Mr Obama said his faith in the possibility of creating "a more perfect union" came from his life story as well as his political philosophy.
"I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas . . . I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners, an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters," he said. "It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one."
Inequality and injustice had left many African-Americans feeling angry, he said, an anger shared by many poor white Americans.
The full text of Barack Obama's speech is available at: www.ireland.com/focus/
