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May 6, 2008 By John Eger
Barack Obama's speech on race, some analysts predicted, would effectively end his candidacy for president. He shot himself in the foot, they argued, by shifting the focus away from the economy and the war in Iraq and in the process unearthed people's worst fears of a racially divided nation.
Candor requires acknowledgement that the "body politic" -- as we often call ourselves -- was not ready to talk about race or color or ethnicity, and in the living rooms and coffee shops we so often hear about from the media, Obama committed political suicide.
There is a counter argument, however, worth talking about.
Whether Obama succeeds in his race for the Democratic nomination, there are some who believe he unleashed something much bigger than a defense and explanation of his pastor's ill-considered sermons -- a dialogue if you will, about race, religion and gender, issues that lie just beneath the surface not only in America, but the world over.
"Increasingly," Daniel Bell, author of The Post Industrial Society predicted some years ago "the nation state is under pressures that are cracking it. A striking thing, if you look around, is with all the talk of globalization and national integration, in almost every political arena of the world, you'll find factors for disintegration. In Northern Ireland, it is religious, in Canada it is linguistic, in Belgium it is linguistic, and in Nigeria it is tribal."
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