By Storer H. Rowley | Tribune re****ter
May 14, 2008
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu weighed in on the presidential
campaign Tuesday in Chicago, praising America's ability to produce the
first viable African-American presidential candidate while describing
the nation as haunted by a racial divide that still offers blacks what
he called only "the illusion of equality."
"You are a crazy country," Tutu, 76, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1984, said in an interview with the Tribune. "You're a country that
has I think some of the most generous people I've ever come across in
the world."
But he chided Americans for getting "very, very upset" with the pastor
of Sen. Barack Obama, noting that Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. "may have
said more crudely what, actually, almost every African-American would
have wanted to say. I mean that is how they feel in your country, that
race ... is a very, very real issue."
"And I think on the whole you keep trying to pretend it isn't," he
added, noting the issue will haunt Americans until there is a way to
talk honestly about race, such as holding a reconciliation forum.
Tutu, who headed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
probing human-rights abuses under apartheid, was here to receive the
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation's Lincoln Leader****p
Prize, presented by Oprah Winfrey.
Unlike in South Africa's apartheid era, he said, where blacks were
treated as "nothing," in America, "You say to them, 'You're equal, and
the sky's the limit.' And they keep bumping their heads against this
thing that's stopping them from reaching out to the stars."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-tutu-obamamay14,0,4305030.story
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