The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [112]
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,