Racial Issues in the Barack Obama Campaign: Jeremiah Wright, Obama-Bashing and Media Scrutiny

Is Barack Obama being over-scrutinized when it comes to his supporters' racial views? Is the media over-analyzing and artificially inflating the importance of race and ethnicity in and around Obama's campaign as we draw nearer to November? Are mainstream Americans finally "over" the idea of political correctness just in the nick of time to fling the door of racial discourse wide open in Barack Obama's face?

The answer to all of these questions is an undeniable yes.

In fact, it's incredible that the race "issue" didn't blow up sooner, on an even larger scale. It took some crazy, over-the-top comments by Obama supporter Reverend Jeremiah Wright to finally bring race to the forefront of the 2008 presidential race in a mainstream sense.

It's surprising that it took such a dramatic event to highlight the "race thing" simply because Barack Obama is the first non-white presidential candidate to be legitimized by our nation's political-financial-media machine. The legitimacy of that old, ineffective machine is beside the point--or maybe it makes the point that much more important. It's basically the exact same fatally flawed two-party electoral system that was in place back when white people were allowed to own black people, give or take a couple hundred years of cumbersome "tweaks" and wholesale dry rot.

In short, Barack Obama is a miracle. And (despite the fact that we still, for the most part, claim to be a God-fearing and God-loving country) most Americans don't actually like miracles very much. In fact, they fear them just as much as they fear all other forms of the unknown, the unexpected and the abnormal.

MSN's homepage early the morning of Easter Sunday added fuel to the fire by featuring an article about American clergy "preparing" for the Obama-caused "unpatrolled intersection of race and religion" as if it were a war or a plague.

Other websites covered Barack Obama's recent Philadelphia speech (a speech intended to diffuse the racial "issues" he never asked for) with alarmist, race-baiting headlines like "America's New Racial Reality: White Minority Status".