Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

MY ELECTION WASN’T just aided by the evolving racial attitudes of Illinois’s white voters. It reflected changes in Illinois’s African American community as well.

One measure of these changes could be seen in the types of early support my campaign received. Of the first $500,000 that I raised during the primary, close to half came from black businesses and professionals. It was a black-owned radio station, WVON, that first began to mention my campaign on the Chicago airwaves, and a black-owned weekly newsmagazine, N’Digo, that first featured me on its cover. One of the first times I needed a corporate jet for the campaign, it was a black friend who lent me his.

Such capacity simply did not exist a generation ago. Although Chicago has always had one of the more vibrant black business communities in the country, in the sixties and seventies only a handful of self-made men — John Johnson, the founder of Ebony and Jet; George Johnson, the founder of Johnson Products; Ed Gardner, the founder of Soft Sheen; and Al Johnson, the first black in the country to own a GM franchise — would have been considered wealthy by the standards of white America.

Today not only is the city filled with black doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals, but blacks also occupy some of the highest management positions in corporate Chicago. Blacks own restaurant chains, investment banks, PR agencies, real estate investment trusts, and architectural firms. They can afford to live in neighborhoods of their choosing and send their children to the best private schools. They are actively recruited to join civic boards and generously support all manner of charities.

Statistically, the number of African Americans who occupy the top fifth of the income ladder remains relatively small. Moreover, every black professional and businessperson in Chicago can tell you stories of the roadblocks they still experience on account of race. Few African American entrepreneurs have either the inherited wealth or the angel investors to help launch their businesses or cushion them from a sudden economic downturn. Few doubt that if they were white they would be further along in reaching their goals.

And yet you won’t hear these men and women use race as a crutch or point to discrimination as an excuse for failure. In fact, what characterizes this new generation of black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what they can achieve. When a friend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office decided to start his own investment bank, his goal wasn’t to grow it into the top black firm — he wanted it to become the top firm, period. When another friend decided to leave an executive position at General Motors to start his own parking service company in partnership with Hyatt, his mother thought he was crazy. “She couldn’t imagine anything better than having a management job at GM,” he told me, “because those jobs were unattainable for her generation. But I knew I wanted to build something of my own.”

That simple notion — that one isn’t confined in one’s dreams — is so central to our understanding of America that it seems almost commonplace. But in black America, the idea represents a radical break from the past, a severing of the psychological shackles of slavery and Jim Crow. It is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rights movement, a gift from those leaders like John Lewis and Rosa Parks who marched, rallied, and endured threats, arrests, and beatings to widen the doors of freedom. And it is also a testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whose heroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their lives in jobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and saving to buy a small home; parents who did without so that their children could take dance classes or the school-sponsored field trip; parents who coached Little League games and baked birthday cakes and badgered teachers to make sure that their children weren’t tracked into the less challenging programs; parents who dragged their children to church every Sunday, whupped their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out for all the children on the block during long summer days and into the night. Parents who pushed their children to achieve and fortified them with a love that could withstand whatever the larger society might throw at them.

It is through this quintessentially American path of upward mobility that the black middle class has grown fourfold in a generation, and that the black poverty rate was cut in half. Through a similar process of hard work and commitment to family, Latinos have seen comparable gains: From 1979 to 1999, the number of Latino families considered middle class has grown by more than 70 percent. In their hopes and expectations, these black and Latino workers are largely indistinguishable from their white counterparts. They are the people who make our economy run and our democracy flourish — the teachers, mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers, bus drivers, postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constitute America’s vital heart.

And yet, for all the progress that’s been made in the past four decades, a stubborn gap remains between the living standards of black, Latino, and white workers. The average black wage is 75 percent of the average white wage; the average Latino wage is 71 percent of the average white wage. Black median net worth is about $6,000, and Latino median net worth is about $8,000, compared to $88,000 for whites. When laid off from their job or confronted with a family emergency, blacks and Latinos have less savings to draw on, and parents are less able to lend their children a helping hand. Even middle-class blacks and Latinos pay more for insurance, are less likely to own their own homes, and suffer poorer health than Americans as a whole. More minorities may be living the American dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous.

How we close this persistent gap — and how much of a role government should play in achieving that goal — remains one of the central controversies of American politics. But there should be some strategies we can all agree on. We might start with completing the unfinished business of the civil rights movement — namely, enforcing nondiscrimination laws in such basic areas as employment, housing, and education. Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there, even in the relatively unskilled jobs, or stop by a local trade union hall and inquire as to the number of blacks in the apprenticeship program, or read recent studies showing that real estate brokers continue to steer prospective black homeowners away from predominantly white neighborhoods. Unless you live in a state without many black residents, I think you’ll agree that something’s amiss.

Under recent Republican Administrations, such enforcement of civil rights laws has been tepid at best, and under the current Administration, it’s been essentially nonexistent — unless one counts the eagerness of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to label university scholarship or educational enrichment programs targeted at minority students as “reverse discrimination,” no matter how underrepresented minority students may be in a particular institution or field, and no matter how incidental the program’s impact on white students.

This should be a source of concern across the political spectrum, even to those who oppose affirmative action. Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students. Given the dearth of black and Latino Ph.D. candidates in mathematics and the physical sciences, for example, a modest scholarship program for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields (a recent target of a Justice Department inquiry) won’t keep white students out of such programs, but can broaden the pool of talent that America will need for all of us to prosper in a technology-based economy. Moreover, as a lawyer who’s worked on civil rights cases, I can say that where there’s strong evidence of prolonged and systematic discrimination by large corporations, trade unions, or branches of municipal government, goals and timetables for minority hiring may be the only meaningful remedy available.