THE FUNERAL WAS held in a big church, a gleaming, geometric structure spreadout over ten well-manicured acres. Reputedly, it had cost $35 million to build, andevery dollar showed—there was a banquet hall, a conference center, a 1,200-car parkinglot, a state-of-the-art sound system, and a TV production facility with digital editingequipment.
Inside the church sanctuary, some four thousand mourners had already gathered, mostof them African American, many of them professionals of one sort or another: doctors,lawyers, accountants, educators, and real estate brokers. On the stage, senators,governors, and captains of industry mingled with black leaders like Jesse Jackson, JohnLewis, Al Sharpton, and T. D. Jakes. Outside, under a bright October sun, thousandsmore stood along the quiet streets: elderly couples, solitary men, young women withstrollers, some waving to the motorcades that occasionally passed, others standing inquiet contemplation, all of them waiting to pay their final respects to the diminutive,gray-haired woman who lay in the casket within.
The choir sang; the pastor said an opening prayer. Former President Bill Clinton rose tospeak, and began to describe what it had been like for him as a white Southern boy toride in segregated buses, how the civil rights movement that Rosa Parks helped sparkhad liberated him and his white neighbors from their own bigotry. Clinton’s ease withhis black audience, their almost giddy affection for him, spoke of reconciliation, offorgiveness, a partial mending of the past’s grievous wounds.
In many ways, seeing a man who was both the former leader of the free world and a sonof the South acknowledge the debt he owed a black seamstress was a fitting tribute tothe legacy of Rosa Parks. Indeed, the magnificent church, the multitude of black electedofficials, the evident prosperity of so many of those in attendance, and my own presenceonstage as a United States senator—all of it could be traced to that December day in1955 when, with quiet determination and unruffled dignity, Mrs. Parks had refused tosurrender her seat on a bus. In honoring Rosa Parks, we honored others as well, thethousands of women and men and children across the South whose names were absentfrom the history books, whose stories had been lost in the slow eddies of time, butwhose courage and grace had helped liberate a people.
And yet, as I sat and listened to the former President and the procession of speakers thatfollowed, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of devastation that had dominatedthe news just two months earlier, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast andNew Orleans was submerged. I recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursingin front of the New Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hoisted to their hips, andold women in wheelchairs, heads lolled back from the heat, their withered legs exposedunder soiled dresses. I thought about the news footage of a solitary body someone hadlaid beside a wall, motionless beneath the flimsy dignity of a blanket; and the scenes ofshirtless young men in sagging pants, their legs churning through the dark waters, theirarms draped with whatever goods they had managed to grab from nearby stores, thespark of chaos in their eyes.
I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way backfrom 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, asthey announced fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visitedwith some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the HoustonAstrodome and adjoining Reliant Center.
The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities toaccommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide themwith food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along the rows of cotsthat now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing with children, listening topeople’s stories, it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandonedlong before the hurricane struck. They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood inany American city, the faces of black poverty—the jobless and almost jobless, the sickand soon to be sick, the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing offher children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they hadlost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group of young meninsisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans ofblack people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an Astros T-shirt two sizes toobig, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.
“We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered. “Now we got less thannothin’.”
In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones, trying tosecure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic Caucus meetings, mycolleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I appeared on the Sunday morning newsshows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’svictims were black—“the incompetence was color-blind,” I said—but insisting that theAdministration’s inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from, andindifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be addressed. Lateone afternoon we joined Republican senators in what the Bush Administration deemed aclassified briefing on the federal response. Almost the entire Cabinet was there, alongwith 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—asthey recited the number of evacuations made, military rations distributed, NationalGuard 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 helpedexpose and proclaiming that New Orleans would rise again.
And now, sitting at the funeral of Rosa Parks, nearly two months after the storm, afterthe outrage and shame that Americans across the country had felt during the crisis, afterthe speeches and emails and memos and caucus meetings, after television specials andessays and extended newspaper coverage, it felt as if nothing had happened. Carsremained on rooftops. Bodies were still being discovered. Stories drifted back from theGulf that the big contractors were landing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth ofcontracts, circumventing prevailing wage and affirmative action laws, hiring illegalimmigrants to keep their costs down. The sense that the nation had reached atransformative moment—that it had had its conscience stirred out of a long slumber andwould 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. Parksunder the Capitol dome. There would be a commemorative stamp bearing her likeness,and countless streets, schools, and libraries across America would no doubt bear hername. I wondered what Rosa Parks would make of all of this—whether stamps orstatues could summon her spirit, or whether honoring her memory demanded somethingmore.
I thought about what that woman in Houston had whispered to me, and wondered howwe 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 myspeech 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 AsianAmerica—there’s the United States of America.” For them, it seems to capture a visionof America finally freed from the past of Jim Crow and slavery, Japanese internmentcamps and Mexican braceros, workplace tensions and cultural conflict—an Americathat fulfills Dr. King’s promise that we be judged not by the color of our skin but by thecontent of our character.
In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of ablack man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot ofHawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican orPuerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some bloodrelatives 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 GeneralAssembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis ofrace, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.
Moreover, I believe that part of America’s genius has always been its ability to absorbnewcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on ourshores. In this we’ve been aided by a Constitution that—despite being marred by theoriginal 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 allcomers, regardless of status or title or rank. Of course, racism and nativist sentimentshave repeatedly undermined these ideals; the powerful and the privileged have oftenexploited 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 graduallyshaped how we understand ourselves and allowed us to form a multicultural nation thelikes of which exists nowhere else on earth.
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 aremajority minority. Twelve other states have populations that are more than a thirdLatino, black, and/or Asian. Latino Americans now number forty-two million and arethe fastest-growing demographic group, accounting for almost half of the nation’spopulation growth between 2004 and 2005; the Asian American population, though farsmaller, has experienced a similar surge and is expected to increase by more than 200percent over the next forty-five years. Shortly after 2050, experts project, America willno longer be a majority white country—with consequences for our economics, ourpolitics, and our culture that we cannot fully anticipate.
Still, when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have arrived ata “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind society, I have to offer aword of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longermatters—that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minoritiesface in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almostevery single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy toemployment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue tolag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America,minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only threeLatinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am thechamber’s sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part inthese disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience—and torelieve 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 thatinsulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man mustendure—I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years havebeen directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, whitecouples 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 peopletell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill ofswallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilantagainst some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb—from TVand music and friends and the streets—about who the world thinks they are, and whatthe world imagines they should be.
To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen—tomaintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely atAmerica as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the presentwithout becoming trapped in cynicism or despair. I have witnessed a profound shift inrace relations in my lifetime. I have felt it as surely as one feels a change in thetemperature. When I hear some in the black community deny those changes, I think itnot only dishonors those who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency tocomplete the work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, Iam 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 takenplace in both the white and black communities of Illinois over the past twenty-fiveyears. By the time I ran, Illinois already had a history of blacks elected to statewideoffice, including a black state comptroller and attorney general (Roland Burris), aUnited States senator (Carol Moseley Braun), and a sitting secretary of state, JesseWhite, who had been the state’s leading vote-getter only two years earlier. Because ofthe pioneering success of these public officials, my own campaign was no longer anovelty—I might not have been favored to win, but the fact of my race didn’t foreclosethe possibility.
Moreover, the types of voters who ultimately gravitated to my campaign defied theconventional wisdom. On the day I announced my candidacy for the U.S. Senate, forexample, three of my white state senate colleagues showed up to endorse me. Theyweren’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 andmight be expected to embrace a lost cause such as mine. Instead, they were threemiddle-aged, working-class guys—Terry Link of Lake County, Denny Jacobs of theQuad 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 Springfieldduring the previous seven years and had maintained a weekly poker game whenever wewere 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 whitecandidates.
But it wasn’t just our personal relationships that led them to support me (although thestrength of my friendships with these men—all of whom grew up in neighborhoods andat a time in which hostility toward blacks was hardly unusual—itself said somethingabout 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 ownpositions at risk. The fact was, they all thought that I’d “sell” in their districts—oncetheir constituents met me and could get past the name.
They didn’t make such a judgment blind. For seven years they had watched me interactwith their constituents, in the state capitol or on visits to their districts. They had seenwhite mothers hand me their children for pictures and watched white World War II vetsshake my hand after I addressed their convention. They sensed what I’d come to knowfrom a lifetime of experience: that whatever preconceived notions white Americans maycontinue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able—if given thetime—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, orAsian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especiallystereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black work ethic. Ingeneral, members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by thedegree of our assimilation—how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform tothe dominant white culture—and the more that a minority strays from these externalmarkers, the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions. If an internalization ofantidiscrimination norms over the past three decades—not to mention basic decency—prevents most whites from consciously acting on such stereotypes in their dailyinteractions with persons of other races, it’s unrealistic to believe that these stereotypesdon’t have some cumulative impact on the often snap decisions of who’s hired andwho’s promoted, on who’s arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about thecustomer who just walked into your store or about the demographics of your children’sschool.
I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely heldthan they once were—and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walkingdown the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’sfriend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have troublecatching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will haveno qualms about hiring him.
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’sdays refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that manyminorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round—thefeeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that asindividuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefitof the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a worldrequires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when shestands at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it requiresthe Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostlywhite company.
Most of all, it requires fighting off the temptation to stop making the effort. Fewminorities can isolate themselves entirely from white society—certainly not in the waythat whites can successfully avoid contact with members of other races. But it ispossible for minorities to pull down the shutters psychologically, to protect themselvesby assuming the worst. “Why should I have to make the effort to disabuse whites oftheir ignorance about us?” I’ve had some blacks tell me. “We’ve been trying for threehundred years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”
To which I suggest that the alternative is surrender—to what has been instead of whatmight be.
One of the things I value most in representing Illinois is the way it has disrupted myown assumptions about racial attitudes. During my Senate campaign, for example, Itraveled with Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, on a thirty-nine-city tour ofsouthern Illinois. One of our scheduled stops was a town called Cairo, at the verysouthern tip of the state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, a town madefamous during the late sixties and early seventies as the site of some of the worst racialconflict anywhere outside of the Deep South. Dick had first visited Cairo during thisperiod, when as a young attorney working for then Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, hehad been sent to investigate what might be done to lessen the tensions there. As wedrove down to Cairo, Dick recalled that visit: how, upon his arrival, he’d been warnednot to use the telephone in his motel room because the switchboard operator was amember of the White Citizens Council; how white store owners had closed theirbusinesses rather than succumb to boycotters’ demands to hire blacks; how blackresidents told him of their efforts to integrate the schools, their fear and frustration, thestories of lynching and jailhouse suicides, shootings and riots.
By the time we pulled into Cairo, I didn’t know what to expect. Although it wasmidday, the town felt abandoned, a handful of stores open along the main road, a fewelderly couples coming out of what appeared to be a health clinic. Turning a corner, wearrived 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 grinon 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 crowdthat day. Most were my age and older and so would at least have remembered, if notbeen a direct part of, those grimmer days thirty years before. No doubt many of themwere there because Ed Smith, one of the most powerful men in the region, wanted themto 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 seeminglyglad 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 moneyinto the schools; we heard about sons and daughters on their way to Iraq and the need totear down an old hospital that had become a blight on downtown. And by the time weleft, 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 reinforcesome 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 asustaining effort. It may last only so long as minorities remain quiescent, silent toinjustice; it can be blown asunder by a few well-timed negative ads featuring whiteworkers displaced by affirmative action, or the news of a police shooting of an unarmedblack 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; thatsuch moments shade a conversation with their children or their coworkers and can weardown, in slow, steady waves, the hatred and suspicion that isolation breeds.
Recently, I was back in southern Illinois, driving with one of my downstate fielddirectors, a young white man named Robert Stephan, after a long day of speeches andappearances in the area. It was a beautiful spring night, the broad waters and duskybanks of the Mississippi shimmering under a full, low-flung moon. The watersreminded me of Cairo and all the other towns up and down the river, the settlements thathad risen and fallen with the barge traffic and the often sad, tough, cruel histories thathad been deposited there at the confluence of the free and enslaved, the world of Huckand the world of Jim.
I mentioned to Robert the progress we’d made on tearing down the old hospital inCairo—our office had started meeting with the state health department and localofficials—and told him about my first visit to the town. Because Robert had grown upin the southern part of the state, we soon found ourselves talking about the racialattitudes of his friends and neighbors. Just the previous week, he said, a few local guyswith some influence had invited him to join them at a small social club in Alton, acouple of blocks from the house where he’d been raised. Robert had never been to theplace, but it seemed nice enough. The food had been served, the group was makingsome small talk, when Robert noticed that of the fifty or so people in the room not asingle 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 evidencethat 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 ayoung man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of habit and fear inorder to do what he knows is right, then I want to be sure that I’m there to meet him onthe other side and help him onto shore.
MY ELECTION WASN’T just aided by the evolving racial attitudes of Illinois’s whitevoters. 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 campaignreceived. Of the first $500,000 that I raised during the primary, close to half came fromblack businesses and professionals. It was a black-owned radio station, WVON, thatfirst began to mention my campaign on the Chicago airwaves, and a black-ownedweekly newsmagazine, N’Digo, that first featured me on its cover. One of the first timesI 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 hadone of the more vibrant black business communities in the country, in the sixties andseventies only a handful of self-made men—John Johnson, the founder of Ebony andJet; George Johnson, the founder of Johnson Products; Ed Gardner, the founder of SoftSheen; and Al Johnson, the first black in the country to own a GM franchise—wouldhave been considered wealthy by the standards of white America.
Today not only is the city filled with black doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, andother professionals, but blacks also occupy some of the highest management positionsin corporate Chicago. Blacks own restaurant chains, investment banks, PR agencies,real estate investment trusts, and architectural firms. They can afford to live inneighborhoods 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 ofcharities.
Statistically, the number of African Americans who occupy the top fifth of the incomeladder remains relatively small. Moreover, every black professional and businesspersonin Chicago can tell you stories of the roadblocks they still experience on account ofrace. Few African American entrepreneurs have either the inherited wealth or the angelinvestors to help launch their businesses or cushion them from a sudden economicdownturn. Few doubt that if they were white they would be further along in reachingtheir goals.
And yet you won’t hear these men and women use race as a crutch or point todiscrimination as an excuse for failure. In fact, what characterizes this new generationof black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what they can achieve. When afriend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch’s Chicago officedecided to start his own investment bank, his goal wasn’t to grow it into the top blackfirm—he wanted it to become the top firm, period. When another friend decided toleave an executive position at General Motors to start his own parking service companyin partnership with Hyatt, his mother thought he was crazy. “She couldn’t imagineanything better than having a management job at GM,” he told me, “because those jobswere unattainable for her generation. But I knew I wanted to build something of myown.”
That simple notion—that one isn’t confined in one’s dreams—is so central to ourunderstanding of America that it seems almost commonplace. But in black America, theidea represents a radical break from the past, a severing of the psychological shackles ofslavery and Jim Crow. It is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rightsmovement, 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 itis also a testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whoseheroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their lives injobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and saving to buy asmall home; parents who did without so that their children could take dance classes orthe school-sponsored field trip; parents who coached Little League games and bakedbirthday cakes and badgered teachers to make sure that their children weren’t trackedinto the less challenging programs; parents who dragged their children to church everySunday, whupped their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out forall the children on the block during long summer days and into the night. Parents whopushed their children to achieve and fortified them with a love that could withstandwhatever the larger society might throw at them.
It is through this quintessentially American path of upward mobility that the blackmiddle class has grown fourfold in a generation, and that the black poverty rate was cutin half. Through a similar process of hard work and commitment to family, Latinoshave seen comparable gains: From 1979 to 1999, the number of Latino familiesconsidered middle class has grown by more than 70 percent. In their hopes andexpectations, these black and Latino workers are largely indistinguishable from theirwhite counterparts. They are the people who make our economy run and our democracyflourish—the teachers, mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers,bus drivers, postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constituteAmerica’s vital heart.
And yet, for all the progress that’s been made in the past four decades, a stubborn gapremains between the living standards of black, Latino, and white workers. The averageblack wage is 75 percent of the average white wage; th............