The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [109]
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