THERE are two races from which there appears to be no escape. One is the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the United States. The other is the question of race, which has been turned into a dominant question in the aforementioned contest.

Barack Obama was supposed to be the post-racial candidate, proof positive of the notion that, four decades after the civil rights movement succeeded in securing most of its immediate goals, race had ceased to be a deeply divisive factor in American politics.

As the primary season got underway, the initial results augured well: some blacks needed convincing that Obama would be a better bet than Hillary Clinton, but whites were voting for him in droves. Eventually, the doubts that some African Americans had harboured about Obama began to evaporate: he was on to a winning combination, winning the vast majority of black votes, plus enough white votes to trounce the former first lady.

That’s when Bill Clinton butted in, suggesting that Obama’s triumph in South Carolina was unremarkable on account of the state’s racial composition. He was roundly chastised for that insinuation, but that was only the beginning. In March, videos from 2001 suddenly surfaced of the pastor at Obama’s local church in Chicago damning his nation for its sins and saying that 9/11 was an instance of “America’s chickens coming home to roost”.

One would have thought the latter assertion, at least, wouldn’t be particularly controversial nearly seven years after the September 11 attacks. It is, after all, common knowledge that the atrocities perpetrated in New York and Washington were not exactly unrelated to the policies the US has pursued abroad, and a number of American intellectuals, including Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky, have articulated similar ideas in considerably greater depth.

Nor was the pastor in question, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, veering into the kooky zone occupied by white evangelical preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who absurdly claimed that 9/11 was a manifestation of divine wrath on account of America’s tolerance of abominations such as homosexuality and abortion.

Somewhat more alarmingly, however, Wright was also on record as having expressed the view that the HIV-Aids virus was officially introduced as a means of genocide against “people of colour”.Even though there was no evidence whatsoever of Obama having endorsed any of these opinions, the fact that Wright had officiated at his wedding and baptised his daughters was dished up as proof of guilt by association. Obama, forced on the defensive, dissociated himself from the pastor’s remarks but refused to disown him.

In a remarkably eloquent and extraordinarily pertinent speech on the question of race, he noted that to do so would be akin to spurning his white grandmother, who had brought him up and loved him dearly, but was nonetheless disposed to occasional racial stereotyping that made him cringe.

Last week, however, Obama was obliged to unequivocally sever himself from Wright, after the latter, in a series of public appearances, reignited more than one controversy. It is perfectly possible that Wright’s re-emergence was driven by nothing more than narcissism, but it would not be surprising to discover that he was somehow, directly or otherwise, coaxed out of retirement by one of Obama’s rivals. After all, should Obama’s presidential bid fail over the coming weeks, it will be impossible to discount the responsibility of the Wright factor.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that the ex-pastor is entirely to blame. After all, as far as the tradition of black liberation theology goes, he is hardly far removed from the mainstream. It ought not to be forgotten that this theological variant played a crucial role in the civil rights movement, whose triumphs, albeit limited, were absolutely essential in creating the conditions that enabled Obama to emerge as a credible candidate.

The racial divide has certainly not been obliterated, however, and this is particularly evident on Sunday mornings when, by and large, black and white Americans head off towards churches that are effectively — if no longer formally — segregated.

The fact that Obama, 20 years ago, felt obliged to join a church in order to pursue a political career serves as a reminder that the separation of church and state in the US is something of a myth. The possibility of a black man or a woman becoming head of state has, with some justification, been trumpeted as a landmark achievement, but it could be decades before the US boasts a declared agnostic or atheist as president. That is why the insinuations that Obama might be irreligious or, worse still, a covert Muslim have gained so much traction. The effort to paint him as the other — as non-American — is clearly aimed at rendering him unelectable.

Unfortunately but not entirely surprisingly, the available evidence suggests that the Clinton campaign has played a bigger role in disparaging his fitness to serve as commander-in-chief than the camp of John McCain. Of late, Hillary Clinton has openly been collaborating with those she would once have dismissed as right-wing conspirators in disseminating views intended to prejudice voters against Obama.

His perfectly reasonable generalisation about economically embittered small-town Americans turning to guns and religion has been twisted to insinuate that he is elitist and out of touch with ordinary folk.

Even more disturbingly, the partial truth that low-income whites are not prepared to vote for a black president has been turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the proportion of working-class whites voting for Obama in the primaries has been declining, with much being made of the implication that the same pattern of behaviour will manifest itself in November. As Gary Younge aptly pointed out in The Guardian last month: “Hillary once said it takes a village to raise a child. Now she seems determined to destroy the village in order to save it.”

To her discomfiture, however, none of the controversies has stemmed the wave of Democratic legislators and super-delegates pledging their support for Obama. Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina were not considered likely to decide a contest that is now clearly damaging the Democratic Party and its chances against McCain. The trend still points towards the likelihood of an Obama-McCain face-off later this year. But the Clintons won’t give up, and their perseverance, combined with the race card, may yet pay off.

Don’t expect Hillary to confess, meanwhile, that when she and Bill required spiritual counselling in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair, the pastor they summoned to the White House was none other than the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com