David Dante Troutt

The Great Black Hope

The sun had barely risen on Barack Obama’s first full day as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States when my brother-in-law stood alone in front of a Seattle Starbucks, waiting for it to open, and soon encountered the old racial microaggressions.  He is black.  Within a few minutes, several white Seattleites, also dressed for work, approached the door and awkwardly formed a line.  No one met his eyes or acknowledged him.  No one was rude.  They simply ignored him and formed a line surrounding him, as if he were a tree or a mailbox.  When my brother-in-law and I talked later about his moment of invisibility, we assumed that many of these same people in line voted for Obama in the primary and will vote for him in November.

The moment raises the question: How would an Obama presidency likely improve the daily lives of the average black person in America?  So far, I’ve come up with five tangible benefits, and the greatest beneficiaries might not be middle-class professional blacks like my brother-in-law and me, but working-class and poorer blacks who make up a plurality of all black Americans.  Yet first has to be the intangible changes that come with the power of symbols to alter reality.

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