Barack Obama's comments Tuesday has put the American black community into one of the most serious and potentially one of the most divisive dilemmas they have ever faced. Who will they choose to follow: Barack Obama or Jeremiah Wright?
Obama's condemnation of Dr. Jeremiah Wright's comments at the National Press Club Monday has caused a firestorm within the black community. Obama has turned his back on Wright, the same person Obama referred to just weeks ago as "an uncle" and who Obama named his book "The Audacity of Hope." In a desperate attempt to save his presidential bid, he has placed blacks into a political and religious dilemma -- especially for those hundreds of thousands of Black Muslims and those blacks within liberal denominations and those who follow the black liberation theology taught by Wright and his ministerial peers.
This political division could be devastating not only to the black 13% of America's population, but to the Democratic Party, who looks to the black community's voting bloc to remain in power.
The Obama distancing will force black Americans to choose where their loyalties lie -- either with Dr. Jeremiah Wright or with Senator Obama. It seems almost unbelievable that the very presidential candidate whose uniqueness was a platform built as early as 2004 on ideals such as "no red states, no blue states, no white and no black America" could now be the very source of irreparable division between his political party faithful and his black American brothers and sisters.
