The Audacity of Hope (28 page)

THIS IS NOT to say that I’m unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I’m absolutely sure about—the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

Those beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city’s Civil Rights Institute. The institute is right across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where, in 1963, four young children—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair—lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded during Sunday school, and before my talk I took the opportunity to visit the church. The young

pastor and several deacons greeted me at the door and showed me the still-visible scar along the wall where the bomb went off. I saw the clock at the back of the church, still frozen at 10:22 a.m. I studied the portraits of the four little girls.

After the tour, the pastor, deacons, and I held hands and said a prayer in the sanctuary. Then they left me to sit in one of the pews and gather my thoughts. What must it have been like for those parents forty years ago, I wondered, knowing that their precious daughters had been snatched away by violence at once so casual and so vicious? How could they endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind their children’s murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss? Those parents would have seen the mourners pour in from all across the nation, would have read the condolences from across the globe, would have watched as Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that the time had come to overcome, would have seen Congress finally pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain—that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and eternal rage—unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better place?

My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread through her body and it was clear that there was no coming back. She had admitted to me during the course of her illness that she was not ready to die; the suddenness of it all had taken her by surprise, as if the physical world she loved so much had turned on her, betrayed her. And although she fought valiantly, endured the pain and chemotherapy with grace and good humor to the very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that frightened her, I think—the notion that on this final journey, on this last adventure, she would have no one to fully share her experiences with, no one who could marvel with her at the body’s capacity to inflict pain on itself, or laugh at the stark absurdity of life once one’s hair starts falling out and one’s salivary glands shut down.

I carried such thoughts with me as I left the church and made my speech. Later that night, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them up the stairs and to their baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two girls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another, that desire to snatch up each moment of your child’s presence and never let go—to preserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of their fingers clasped around yours. I thought of Sasha asking me once what happened when we die—“I don’t want to die, Daddy,” she had added matter-of-factly—and I had hugged her and said, “You’ve got a long, long way before you have to worry about that,” which had seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for—that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits.

I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven.

The Audacity of Hope

Chapter Seven

Race

THE FUNERAL WAS held in a big church, a gleaming, geometric structure spread out over ten well-manicured acres. Reputedly, it had cost $35 million to build, and every dollar showed—there was a banquet hall, a conference center, a 1,200-car parking lot, a state-of-the-art sound system, and a TV production facility with digital editing equipment.

Inside the church sanctuary, some four thousand mourners had already gathered, most of 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, John Lewis, Al Sharpton, and T. D. Jakes. Outside, under a bright October sun, thousands more stood along the quiet streets: elderly couples, solitary men, young women with strollers, some waving to the motorcades that occasionally passed, others standing in quiet 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 to speak, and began to describe what it had been like for him as a white Southern boy to ride in segregated buses, how the civil rights movement that Rosa Parks helped spark had liberated him and his white neighbors from their own bigotry. Clinton’s ease with his black audience, their almost giddy affection for him, spoke of reconciliation, of forgiveness, 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 son of the South acknowledge the debt he owed a black seamstress was a fitting tribute to the legacy of Rosa Parks. Indeed, the magnificent church, the multitude of black elected officials, the evident prosperity of so many of those in attendance, and my own presence onstage as a United States senator—all of it could be traced to that December day in 1955 when, with quiet determination and unruffled dignity, Mrs. Parks had refused to surrender her seat on a bus. In honoring Rosa Parks, we honored others as well, the thousands of women and men and children across the South whose names were absent from the history books, whose stories had been lost in the slow eddies of time, but whose courage and grace had helped liberate a people.

And yet, as I sat and listened to the former President and the procession of speakers that followed, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of devastation that had dominated the news just two months earlier, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans was submerged. I recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursing in front of the New Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hoisted to their hips, and old women in wheelchairs, heads lolled back from the heat, their withered legs exposed under soiled dresses. I thought about the news footage of a solitary body someone had laid beside a wall, motionless beneath the flimsy dignity of a blanket; and the scenes of shirtless young men in sagging pants, their legs churning through the dark waters, their arms draped with whatever goods they had managed to grab from nearby stores, the spark of chaos in their eyes.

I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way back from 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, as they announced fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visited with some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the Houston Astrodome and adjoining Reliant Center.

The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities to accommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide them with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along the rows of cots that now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing with children, listening to people’s stories, it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned long before the hurricane struck. They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in any American city, the faces of black poverty—the jobless and almost jobless, the sick and soon to be sick, the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing off her children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they had lost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group of young men insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans of black people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an Astros T-shirt two sizes too big, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.

“We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered. “Now we got less than nothin’.”

In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones, trying to secure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic Caucus meetings, my colleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’s victims were black—“the incompetence was color-blind,” I said—but insisting that the Administration’s inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from, and indifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be addressed. Late one afternoon we joined Republican senators in what the Bush Administration deemed a classified briefing on the federal response. Almost the entire Cabinet was there, along with 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—as they recited the number of evacuations made, military rations distributed, National Guard 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 helped expose and proclaiming that New Orleans would rise again.

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 exploited 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 gradually shaped how we understand ourselves and allowed us to form a multicultural nation the likes 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 are majority minority. Twelve other states have populations that are more than a third Latino, black, and/or Asian. Latino Americans now number forty-two million and are the fastest-growing demographic group, accounting for almost half of the nation’s population growth between 2004 and 2005; the Asian American population, though far smaller, has experienced a similar surge and is expected to increase by more than 200

percent over the next forty-five years. Shortly after 2050, experts project, America will no longer be a majority white country—with consequences for our economics, our politics, and our culture that we cannot fully anticipate.

Still, when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have arrived at a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind society, I have to offer a word of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters—that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the chamber’s sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience—and to relieve 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 that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure—I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples 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 people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb—from TV and music and friends and the streets—about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be.

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen—to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair. I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime. I have felt it as surely as one feels a change in the temperature. When I hear some in the black community deny those changes, I think it not only dishonors those who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency to complete the work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am 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 taken place in both the white and black communities of Illinois over the past twenty-five years. By the time I ran, Illinois already had a history of blacks elected to statewide

office, including a black state comptroller and attorney general (Roland Burris), a United States senator (Carol Moseley Braun), and a sitting secretary of state, Jesse White, who had been the state’s leading vote-getter only two years earlier. Because of the pioneering success of these public officials, my own campaign was no longer a novelty—I might not have been favored to win, but the fact of my race didn’t foreclose the possibility.

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.