Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously unreliable. And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After all, spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round — the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly white company.

Most of all, it requires fighting off the temptation to stop making the effort. Few minorities can isolate themselves entirely from white society — certainly not in the way that whites can successfully avoid contact with members of other races. But it is possible for minorities to pull down the shutters psychologically, to protect themselves by assuming the worst. “Why should I have to make the effort to disabuse whites of their ignorance about us?” I’ve had some blacks tell me. “We’ve been trying for three hundred years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”

To which I suggest that the alternative is surrender — to what has been instead of what might be.

One of the things I value most in representing Illinois is the way it has disrupted my own assumptions about racial attitudes. During my Senate campaign, for example, I traveled with Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, on a thirty-nine-city tour of southern Illinois. One of our scheduled stops was a town called Cairo, at the very southern tip of the state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, a town made famous during the late sixties and early seventies as the site of some of the worst racial conflict anywhere outside of the Deep South. Dick had first visited Cairo during this period, when as a young attorney working for then Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, he had been sent to investigate what might be done to lessen the tensions there. As we drove down to Cairo, Dick recalled that visit: how, upon his arrival, he’d been warned not to use the telephone in his motel room because the switchboard operator was a member of the White Citizens Council; how white store owners had closed their businesses rather than succumb to boycotters’ demands to hire blacks; how black residents told him of their efforts to integrate the schools, their fear and frustration, the stories of lynching and jailhouse suicides, shootings and riots.

By the time we pulled into Cairo, I didn’t know what to expect. Although it was midday, the town felt abandoned, a handful of stores open along the main road, a few elderly couples coming out of what appeared to be a health clinic. Turning a corner, we arrived at a large parking lot, where a crowd of a couple of hundred were milling about. A quarter of them were black, almost all the rest white.

They were all wearing blue buttons that read OBAMA FOR U.S. SENATE.

Ed Smith, a big, hearty guy who was the Midwest regional manager of the Laborers’ International Union and who’d grown up in Cairo, strode up to our van with a big grin on his face.

“Welcome,” he said, shaking our hands as we got off the bus. “Hope you’re hungry, ’cause we got a barbecue going and my mom’s cooking.”

I don’t presume to know exactly what was in the minds of the white people in the crowd that day. Most were my age and older and so would at least have remembered, if not been a direct part of, those grimmer days thirty years before. No doubt many of them were there because Ed Smith, one of the most powerful men in the region, wanted them to be there; others may have been there for the food, or just to see the spectacle of a U.S. senator and a candidate for the Senate campaign in their town.

I do know that the barbecue was terrific, the conversation spirited, the people seemingly glad to see us. For an hour or so we ate, took pictures, and listened to people’s concerns. We discussed what might be done to restart the area’s economy and get more money into the schools; we heard about sons and daughters on their way to Iraq and the need to tear down an old hospital that had become a blight on downtown. And by the time we left, I felt a relationship had been established between me and the people I’d met — nothing transformative, but perhaps enough to weaken some of our biases and reinforce some of our better impulses. In other words, a quotient of trust had been built.

Of course, such trust between the races is often tentative. It can wither without a sustaining effort. It may last only so long as minorities remain quiescent, silent to injustice; it can be blown asunder by a few well-timed negative ads featuring white workers displaced by affirmative action, or the news of a police shooting of an unarmed black or Latino youth.

But I also believe that moments like the one in Cairo ripple from their immediate point: that people of all races carry these moments into their homes and places of worship; that such moments shade a conversation with their children or their coworkers and can wear down, in slow, steady waves, the hatred and suspicion that isolation breeds.

Recently, I was back in southern Illinois, driving with one of my downstate field directors, a young white man named Robert Stephan, after a long day of speeches and appearances in the area. It was a beautiful spring night, the broad waters and dusky banks of the Mississippi shimmering under a full, low-flung moon. The waters reminded me of Cairo and all the other towns up and down the river, the settlements that had risen and fallen with the barge traffic and the often sad, tough, cruel histories that had been deposited there at the confluence of the free and enslaved, the world of Huck and the world of Jim.

I mentioned to Robert the progress we’d made on tearing down the old hospital in Cairo — our office had started meeting with the state health department and local officials — and told him about my first visit to the town. Because Robert had grown up in the southern part of the state, we soon found ourselves talking about the racial attitudes of his friends and neighbors. Just the previous week, he said, a few local guys with some influence had invited him to join them at a small social club in Alton, a couple of blocks from the house where he’d been raised. Robert had never been to the place, but it seemed nice enough. The food had been served, the group was making some small talk, when Robert noticed that of the fifty or so people in the room not a single person was black. Since Alton’s population is about a quarter African American, Robert thought this odd, and asked the men about it.

It’s a private club, one of them said.

At first, Robert didn’t understand — had no blacks tried to join? When they said nothing, he said, It’s 2006, for God’s sake.

The men shrugged. It’s always been that way, they told him. No blacks allowed.

Which is when Robert dropped his napkin on his plate, said good night, and left.

I suppose I could spend time brooding over those men in the club, file it as evidence that white people still maintain a simmering hostility toward those who look like me. But I don’t want to confer on such bigotry a power it no longer possesses.

I choose to think about Robert instead, and the small but difficult gesture he made. If a young man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of habit and fear in order to do what he knows is right, then I want to be sure that I’m there to meet him on the other side and help him onto shore.