Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

In many ways, seeing a man who was both the former leader of the free world and a son of the South acknowledge the debt he owed a black seamstress was a fitting tribute to the legacy of Rosa Parks. Indeed, the magnificent church, the multitude of black elected officials, the evident prosperity of so many of those in attendance, and my own presence onstage as a United States senator — all of it could be traced to that December day in 1955 when, with quiet determination and unruffled dignity, Mrs. Parks had refused to surrender her seat on a bus. In honoring Rosa Parks, we honored others as well, the thousands of women and men and children across the South whose names were absent from the history books, whose stories had been lost in the slow eddies of time, but whose courage and grace had helped liberate a people.

And yet, as I sat and listened to the former President and the procession of speakers that followed, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of devastation that had dominated the news just two months earlier, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans was submerged. I recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursing in front of the New Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hoisted to their hips, and old women in wheelchairs, heads lolled back from the heat, their withered legs exposed under soiled dresses. I thought about the news footage of a solitary body someone had laid beside a wall, motionless beneath the flimsy dignity of a blanket; and the scenes of shirtless young men in sagging pants, their legs churning through the dark waters, their arms draped with whatever goods they had managed to grab from nearby stores, the spark of chaos in their eyes.

I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way back from a trip to Russia. One week after the initial tragedy, though, I traveled to Houston, joining Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, as they announced fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visited with some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the Houston Astrodome and adjoining Reliant Center.

The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities to accommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide them with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along the rows of cots that now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing with children, listening to people’s stories, it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned long before the hurricane struck. They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in any American city, the faces of black poverty — the jobless and almost jobless, the sick and soon to be sick, the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing off her children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they had lost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group of young men insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans of black people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an Astros T-shirt two sizes too big, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.

“We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered. “Now we got less than nothin’.”

In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones, trying to secure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic Caucus meetings, my colleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’s victims were black—“the incompetence was color-blind,” I said — but insisting that the Administration’s inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from, and indifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be addressed. Late one afternoon we joined Republican senators in what the Bush Administration deemed a classified briefing on the federal response. Almost the entire Cabinet was there, along with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and for an hour Secretaries Chertoff, Rumsfeld, and the rest bristled with confidence — and displayed not the slightest bit of remorse — as they recited the number of evacuations made, military rations distributed, National Guard troops deployed. A few nights later, we watched President Bush in that eerie, floodlit square, acknowledging the legacy of racial injustice that the tragedy had helped expose and proclaiming that New Orleans would rise again.

And now, sitting at the funeral of Rosa Parks, nearly two months after the storm, after the outrage and shame that Americans across the country had felt during the crisis, after the speeches and emails and memos and caucus meetings, after television specials and essays and extended newspaper coverage, it felt as if nothing had happened. Cars remained on rooftops. Bodies were still being discovered. Stories drifted back from the Gulf that the big contractors were landing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts, circumventing prevailing wage and affirmative action laws, hiring illegal immigrants to keep their costs down. The sense that the nation had reached a transformative moment — that it had had its conscience stirred out of a long slumber and would launch a renewed war on poverty — had quickly died away.

Instead, we sat in church, eulogizing Rosa Parks, reminiscing about past victories, entombed in nostalgia. Already, legislation was moving to place a statue of Mrs. Parks under the Capitol dome. There would be a commemorative stamp bearing her likeness, and countless streets, schools, and libraries across America would no doubt bear her name. I wondered what Rosa Parks would make of all of this — whether stamps or statues could summon her spirit, or whether honoring her memory demanded something more.

I thought about what that woman in Houston had whispered to me, and wondered how we might be judged, in those days after the levee broke.

WHEN I MEET people for the first time, they sometimes quote back to me a line in my speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that seemed to strike a chord: “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” For them, it seems to capture a vision of America finally freed from the past of Jim Crow and slavery, Japanese internment camps and Mexican braceros, workplace tensions and cultural conflict — an America that fulfills Dr. King’s promise that we be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.

In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.

Moreover, I believe that part of America’s genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores. In this we’ve been aided by a Constitution that — despite being marred by the original sin of slavery — has at its very core the idea of equal citizenship under the law; and an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all comers, regardless of status or title or rank. Of course, racism and nativist sentiments have repeatedly undermined these ideals; the powerful and the privileged have often exploited or stirred prejudice to further their own ends. But in the hands of reformers, from Tubman to Douglass to Chavez to King, these ideals of equality have gradually shaped how we understand ourselves and allowed us to form a multicultural nation the likes of which exists nowhere else on earth.