Washington DC - In his speech at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia, Democratic candidate Barack Obama addressed openly the issue of race for the first time since the beginning of the campaign. The speech came in response to increasing criticisms of Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., a pastor of Trinity, the parish of the United Church of Christ that Obama attends in Chicago. Reverend Wright is famous for his sometimes inflammatory rhetoric about race relations in the United States and the discrimination of the African-American minority. Last Tuesday, Senator Obama chose to acknowledge this country's history of segregation and how such past still affects American society today. He explicitely highlighted the need to remember the history of injustice and never to lose sight of the mistakes that have been made. He also encouraged the people of the United States to move beyond ethnic divisions and to start working together for a better, and more just, country.
The Wall Street Journal today publishes a little-noticed, yet stunning, statistics that might confirm the fact that the US is still a divided and segregated country.
In the last few years there has been a notable upswing in the murder rate of African-Americans, while the same figure for overall murders has declined steadily, or remained stable at worst. As a result, the number of black victims of murder exceeds today that of the white poplation, despite the fact that Afican-Americans only comprise 13% of all Americans.
According to the most recent statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the number of whites murdered declined from 7,005 in 2004 to 6,956 in 2006. At the same time, 7,421 black citizens were killed in 2006, an 11% increase from the 6,680 who died in 2004.
The only positive note is that this growing figure is still lower than it was in the early 1990s, when killings of African-Americans spiked due to a wave of drug-related crime.
