The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [111]
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