Obama turns his attention to race

"We cannot treat our poor with disregard," he thundered Tuesday, cataloging America's racial ills, starting with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "We can't leave New Orleans in a mess and then expect to be a model for this world."

Here at the site of the Orangeburg Massacre -- where three students were killed and 27 injured by law enforcement agents during civil rights-era demonstrations to integrate a nearby bowling alley -- Obama decried a criminal-justice system fraught with inequity.

"I don't want Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for other folks," he said, contrasting the white Republican ex-lobbyist with the black youths in Louisiana.

It could be the calendar, the electoral map or the recent flap between the Democratic front-runners. But the senator from Illinois is being forced on the campaign trail to address America's racial inequities more directly and more often than before.

Obama has based his political career on campaigning beyond race, "trying to tap into the fact that a lot of Americans can deal with African Americans as long as they don't talk about race," said Susan Carroll, senior fellow at the Rutgers University Center for American Women and Politics in New Jersey. "It's an incredible balancing act."

In the initial phase of the 2008 campaign, Obama was largely able to finesse the difficult feat of appealing to white voters without alienating African Americans by framing traditionally racial issues in broader socioeconomic terms that allowed listeners from widely divergent backgrounds to hear what they wanted.

And many of the black electorate's early concerns that Obama could not be elected because of his race were assuaged by his win in Iowa, one of the whitest states in the country.

But the race for the Democratic presidential nomination just wended its way through ethnically diverse Nevada and landed in South Carolina -- home to one of the largest concentrations of black voters in the country, as well as Saturday's important primary.

Obama got here just in time for the holiday commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate, where he cast his usual message of colorblind unity in distinctly racial terms, arguing that "white, black, Latino, Asian people want to move beyond our divisions."