Barack Obama's strategy is to get away from anything having to do with race as quickly as he can. His fear is that that might open a Pandora's Box.

What the Clintons have always done is embraced challenging. They can't have enough photo opportunities with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. They communicate to blacks that they agree with their challenging identity. So, in a sense, Hillary is blacker than Barack Obama. Their alignment with this black identity makes them 'black' in a metaphorical sense, I guess.

Sometimes, Barack Obama is Martin Luther King, sometimes, he a black militant from the Sixties, then he's a Baptist minister. He can be so different. There's not yet an Obama voice.

I grew during segregation in an all-black segregated neighborhood with segregated schools, etcetera. I was raised by a great father, my hero, who I much admired. So, I never really had anxiety in the way that someone like Obama would have. When he walks down the street alone, since no one knows who his mother is, they're just going to see him as a black guy.

All politicians are going to mask to some degree in order to present themselves in away they think will get them votes. What's different in Obama's case is that he's wearing a racial mask, this 'bargainer's' mask, and I think very effectively, whereby he gives whites the benefit of the doubt. He's essentially saying, 'I am going to presume you are not racist, if you won't hold my race against me.' So, his mask is a distinctly racial one.

I wrote a piece in the New York Times back in the Nineties saying that racial discrimination ought to be a criminal offense, not just a civil one. I'm all for the criminalization of discrimination.

My honest opinion is that blacks have to fight much harder for their individuality than whites do.