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.

1.  An Obama presidency—notwithstanding the post-racial rhetoric—represents the triumph of black authority.  The prospect of the H.N.I.C. (Head Negro In Charge) being both The Man and the Leader of the Free World cannot be exaggerated or fully comprehended now.  It will be like the dream only your great, great grandfather or mother could speak from within the ancient syllables and melodic cadences of dream talk.  It will feel like the daily observation of miracle.  And that’s just for adults, who will continue to participate politically more as hope empowers faith.

For children, seeing is believing, and black children have not always seen enough success to believe in its achievability.  Obama would be the ultimate role model, the counterfactual to just saying I can’t.  Young people unheard at the margins often assume oppositional postures, cynically (yet understandably) seeking out their own reward systems and rejecting the majority’s measures of success.  Like a secret antidote to stigma, an Obama presidency could provide the symbolic jolt that boosts efforts to transform our perceived status as outsiders.  How?  With a constant infusion of collective self-esteem and a sense that we increasingly belong at the top.

Yet it may not make us entirely visible at Starbucks, which brings up the risks of Obama’s election.  Too much can be made of one man’s success.  The idea of black exceptionalism is as old as tokenism.  White supremacy has always allowed for the special black.  Ironically, Barack’s universal, yet exotically extraordinary story could encourage the country’s tendency to ignore structural disadvantages and hold everyone to Obama’s rock star standards.  Barack has avoided all the things that upset white sensibilities, but we are not all so careful (or lucky).  This could mean no end to the casual public slights experienced by most black Americans.  After all, those slights merely reflect the residue of racial distance, behavioral manifestations of segregation, the power to frustrate.

We already know that an incomplete transformation in racial thinking is one of the very risks this culture assumes with a black president.  The majority’s capacity to reckon with historic privilege and unconscious racism may be too diminished by colorblindness.  We will see.  But in the Starbucks moment we still can look forward to the effect an Obama presidency may have on black people: The slights will lose some of their power to matter.

The other gains are tangible.  They would affect the quality of our lives almost automatically in that they operate in the absence of a Republican administration and before many of Barack’s specific policies kick in.

2.  Obama would end the war sooner than anyone else.  The war has been disastrous for the fortunes of (black) working-class Americans simply because the sheer magnitude of its economic waste has squandered a national budget surplus and created such huge deficits that critical domestic spending priorities have been rendered unthinkable.  Recession makes this more acute.  But given a recession that starts with the personal and neighborhood devastation of subprime borrowers—disproportionately located in black areas—as well as skyrocketing gas prices, it is even more critical that the national government boldly lead.  Endless war makes this unlikely and politically impractical.  Ending the war changes everything for the better.

3.  Curtailing the political influence of the wealthy in Washington—even by half of Obama’s wildest dreams—could dramatically enlarge the issues that matter to government.  As the flow of private money controls government priorities, the potential for truly proactive federal policies is stymied.  Privilege is therefore protected at the expense of the social contract, by distributing wealth upwards where blacks are scarce.  Equity transfers wealth to the economic middle where blacks are more concentrated.  In fact, even a moderate Obama administration could secure more equitable federal policies by reducing the role of money, increasing enforcement of existing laws and updating regulation.

A more progressive Obama presidency could go after residential segregation and aid to cities, two issues that have seen virtually no federal support in many years.  Try the thought experiment of imagining another Katrina under President Obama.  Impossible.

4.  Health care reform is manna from heaven for black people.  This benefit could be first on the list.  People with access to quality affordable health care live longer, healthier lives.  Black people—being disproportionately working-class—regularly lead the nation in negative health indicators, including lower life expectancy and death from preventable illness.  Theoretically, this all ends (or begins to end) with universal care.

5.  Barack’s agency appointments will transform what the federal government is capable of doing.  This is almost easy after the mess Bush has made of agencies like HUD, FEMA and the Department of Justice.  Smart, thoughtful people with solid skills and excellent training are lining up and fired up to enter government again.  These folks—so many of them black—will quietly demonstrate that Barack may be incredible, but Barack is not alone with talent.

6.  Revamping No Child Left Behind will remove a significant roadblock in burgeoning efforts to overcome educational challenges for students from the most difficult backgrounds.  The law is profoundly flawed on too many levels to name.  Teach-to-the-test curricula is toxic to the creative approaches struggling to succeed in many low-income public school districts.  Nobody is as affected by this as black and brown students—often from working-class and poorer families.

At the end of this list is the sobering realization that most of the gains of a Great Black Hope have less to do with race than class.  The policies that will help stabilize black working- and middle-class lives will just as likely accrue to whites, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans.  This irony of shared interests makes the stated resistance to Obama among many white working-class Democrats unnatural and fatalistic.  If Obama wins in November, we will then ask, can post-racial talk about unified economic interests produce racial reconciliation on its own?  I suspect it will take more.  But at least, like no other president before him, he is up to the challenge.

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