Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

Finally, those lines in my speech describe the demographic realities of America’s future. Already, Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia are majority minority. Twelve other states have populations that are more than a third Latino, black, and/or Asian. Latino Americans now number forty-two million and are the fastest-growing demographic group, accounting for almost half of the nation’s population growth between 2004 and 2005; the Asian American population, though far smaller, has experienced a similar surge and is expected to increase by more than 200 percent over the next forty-five years. Shortly after 2050, experts project, America will no longer be a majority white country — with consequences for our economics, our politics, and our culture that we cannot fully anticipate.

Still, when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have arrived at a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind society, I have to offer a word of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters — that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the chamber’s sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience — and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.

Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience — and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure — I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb — from TV and music and friends and the streets — about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be.

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen — to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair. I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime. I have felt it as surely as one feels a change in the temperature. When I hear some in the black community deny those changes, I think it not only dishonors those who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency to complete the work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough.

MY CAMPAIGN for the U.S. Senate indicates some of the changes that have taken place in both the white and black communities of Illinois over the past twenty-five years. By the time I ran, Illinois already had a history of blacks elected to statewide office, including a black state comptroller and attorney general (Roland Burris), a United States senator (Carol Moseley Braun), and a sitting secretary of state, Jesse White, who had been the state’s leading vote-getter only two years earlier. Because of the pioneering success of these public officials, my own campaign was no longer a novelty — I might not have been favored to win, but the fact of my race didn’t foreclose the possibility.

Moreover, the types of voters who ultimately gravitated to my campaign defied the conventional wisdom. On the day I announced my candidacy for the U.S. Senate, for example, three of my white state senate colleagues showed up to endorse me. They weren’t what we in Chicago call “Lakefront Liberals”—the so-called Volvo-driving, latte-sipping, white-wine-drinking Democrats that Republicans love to poke fun at and might be expected to embrace a lost cause such as mine. Instead, they were three middle-aged, working-class guys — Terry Link of Lake County, Denny Jacobs of the Quad Cities, and Larry Walsh of Will County — all of whom represented mostly white, mostly working-class or suburban communities outside Chicago.

It helped that these men knew me well; the four of us had served together in Springfield during the previous seven years and had maintained a weekly poker game whenever we were in session. It also helped that each of them prided himself on his independence, and was therefore willing to stick with me despite pressure from more favored white candidates.

But it wasn’t just our personal relationships that led them to support me (although the strength of my friendships with these men — all of whom grew up in neighborhoods and at a time in which hostility toward blacks was hardly unusual — itself said something about the evolution of race relations). Senators Link, Jacobs, and Walsh are hard-nosed, experienced politicians; they had no interest in backing losers or putting their own positions at risk. The fact was, they all thought that I’d “sell” in their districts — once their constituents met me and could get past the name.

They didn’t make such a judgment blind. For seven years they had watched me interact with their constituents, in the state capitol or on visits to their districts. They had seen white mothers hand me their children for pictures and watched white World War II vets shake my hand after I addressed their convention. They sensed what I’d come to know from a lifetime of experience: that whatever preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able — if given the time — to look beyond race in making their judgments of people.

This isn’t to say that prejudice has vanished. None of us — black, white, Latino, or Asian — is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black work ethic. In general, members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the degree of our assimilation — how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant white culture — and the more that a minority strays from these external markers, the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions. If an internalization of antidiscrimination norms over the past three decades — not to mention basic decency — prevents most whites from consciously acting on such stereotypes in their daily interactions with persons of other races, it’s unrealistic to believe that these stereotypes don’t have some cumulative impact on the often snap decisions of who’s hired and who’s promoted, on who’s arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about the customer who just walked into your store or about the demographics of your children’s school.

I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely held than they once were — and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walking down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’s friend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have trouble catching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have no qualms about hiring him.