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05/16/2008: "Desmond Tutu: Equality of U.S. blacks an 'illusion'"

"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."

Tutu, who headed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission probing human-rights abuses under apartheid, was here to receive the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation's Lincoln Leadership Prize, presented by Oprah Winfrey.

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."

[ That's their innate limitation. Nature is such a fascist. ]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-tutu-obamamay14,0,4305030.story