Obama on Race

From Roger Simon's excellent interview of Obama published in today's Manchester, NH Union-Leader:

I ended the interview by asking Obama about a quotation from Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning black author, who said she looked forward to a world "where race exists but it doesn't matter." Is that the kind of world you want to see? I asked him.

"I would love to see an America where race is understood in the same way that the ethnic diversity of the white population is understood," Obama said. "People take pride in being Irish-American and Italian-American. They have a particular culture that infuses the (whole) culture and makes it richer and more interesting. But it's not something that determines people's life chances and there is no sense of superiority or inferiority.

"I think if we can expand that attitude to embrace African-Americans and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans, then we will be in a position where all our kids can feel comfortable with the worlds they are coming out of, knowing they are part of something larger."