South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu weighed in on the American 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 former 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.
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.”
Tutu, who headed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission probing human-rights abuses under apartheid, was in Chicago to receive the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation’s Lincoln Leadership Prize, presented by Oprah Winfrey.
The presentation took place at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Chicago. Among the guests at the gala were Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Chicago Roman Catholic Cardinal Francis George, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
The award is bestowed upon “those singular individuals who accept the responsibilities imposed by history and demanded by conscience.”
Tutu was recognized for his activism and work in helping to end apartheid in South Africa.
“What if he’d settled on medicine or on teaching rather than his third career choice, the ministry?” the Sun-Times quoted Winfrey as saying in her introduction. “Without Archbishop Tutu, how would South Africa be different? How would the world be different?”
“There is a great deal of evil in the world and we ought not pretend that isn’t the case,” Tutu said. “And yet you discover there’s a great deal of good as well.”
