Professor Cornel West on whether America is ready for a black president (not
in the Head of State mold either)

From the new print Summer edition of Numb Magazine
http://www.numbmagazine.com

excerpt:
"Well, America's ready for Colin Powell, who's a deeply conservative
brother. Sure America's ready for one. But is America ready for a
progressive black president? No, not at all. They ain't even ready for a
progressive white president. Is America ready for a conservative woman
president? Probably. A progressive woman president? Not at all. We're still
a very adolescent country, immature. America's grown big, it's grown old,
but it has yet to grow up. Nobody grows up unless they wrestle with the
underside of their reality and their own history, and face their own
mortality. Those are the benchmarks of maturity. America is certainly not a
mature nation, so when you talk about issues that deal with its underside,
wealth and equality, the legacies of white and male supremacy, the legacies
of homophobia, America doesn't like to confront that."