We knew there would come a moment when the first black man with a realistic shot at becoming president would have to reconcile black anger and frustration with white fear and resentment. It's a critical test: acknowledging the righteous anger of people frustrated by continuing racial inequality without looking like the kind of Angry Black Man often rejected by more conservative white voters.

Who knew that the race-based bullet wounding Obama's campaign would come from friendly fire -- his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright -- adding yet another unpredictable twist to the most unconventional electoral contest in history?

I've already pointed out how the initial stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons have distorted many of his points. So I'm not saying he shouldn't feel compelled to defend his church and his reputation by facing down the media he way he has by speaking to PBS' Bill Moyers, speaking to the Detroit NAACP Sunday and speaking to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. as I write this.

But Wright's recent appearances will continue to hurt the candidate, because the reverend is the radical Obama never was, and he's close enough to give skeptical white voters an excuse.

The Republican establishment is taking all this in with mixed emotions—part confusion, part exasperation. Talk to them about the black vote and you'll get history books stuffed with anecdotes about how Republicans pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, how Democrats take blacks for granted, how George W. Bush has given an administration job to every black official with a resume, how black home-ownership numbers are way up under the GOP.

If they really want to court the African-American vote, Republicans must first acknowledge—if only to themselves—that they spent the '70s and '80s alienating, and in some cases demonizing, black voters; that their policies (school choice, Social Security privatization) haven't sold with blacks as well as the GOP hoped they would; and that the last decade of outreach has been wasted. Of course, this isn't the quick-fix Republicans want. It's more like a surgeon's advice to the victim of a botched facelift: multiple expensive operations over many, many years. Let the healing begin.

While some deride such moves as attempts to slough off responsibility or soothe the consciences of white liberals, James Campbell, who chaired the 2003-2006 Brown University effort to examine the school's ties to the slave trade, sees efforts to re-examine history as a step towards justice, not an end unto itself. "I believe that how we see the past matters," says Campbell, "because how we understand history helps shape the present matrix of political possibility."

To Cohen, who remembers attending segregated sports games in the South as a child, an apology for slavery and its legacy isn't about pointing fingers but coming to terms with a history that for too long has been elided.

"I didn't own slaves. My parents didn't own slaves," says U.S. Rep. Stephen Cohen. "But as a government for a century, we continued to perpetuate the racism that was at the root of slavery in this country," he says.

After a century of segregation and racial violence, he says, "This is an attempt to start the healing." 

In his plays and movies, Perry shows African Americans as they . . . well, I was about to say he shows us as we really are, but that's not true. Reality is for documentaries; Perry's characters are unsubtle, his humor is broad, and his plots are soaked with melodrama. Among his big themes are love, fidelity and the importance of family, and his movies usually have religious overtones.

What Perry does is depict black Americans as people relating to other people -- not as mere plot devices and not as characters defined solely by how they relate to the white world. The rest of the movie industry would do well to take note.

Perhaps, some strategists suggest, this gender gap is more about women’s loyalty to Mrs. Clinton than about men’s reluctance to vote for a woman. By this argument, men are responding in droves to the broad appeal of Mr. Obama — the promise of change over experience — while women are hanging back in gender solidarity.

But Kathleen Dolan, a professor of political science and an expert on women in politics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, argues that the visceral reaction of many men to Mrs. Clinton suggests that something more is at work. “You could say men are just really captivated by Obama,” Ms. Dolan said. “But I’m not willing to say that’s what it is.”