The Paradox of Katrina in the Age of Obama:
The Strange Legacy of Colorblindness and the Hope of Interdependency
David Dante Troutt
February 2008
(Versions of the following remarks were made during the Black History Month observances at the Community Church of New York City, Brooklyn Law School and Bergen Community College)
I. Introduction
I want to talk with you today about a paradox we are living in American history: the Barack Obama presidential candidacy occurring just a couple of years after the unnatural disaster we know as Hurricane Katrina. Obama’s candidacy would appear to have nothing to do with Hurricane Katrina except to show either that this country has accomplished remarkable growth in its thinking about race as a result of that huge failure, or that it is now ready to concern itself with class. I doubt both very much.
As much as I’d like to talk about presidential politics, I’m just as interested in talking about what I think Katrina means to New Orleans and this country, much of which has a lot to do with race—maybe more than people admit—and a lot about economic position too. Rather than hold you in suspense, I can summarize my conclusions as follows. Katrina revealed a continuing breach of the social contract in the United States and the miserable persistence of segregation by race and class under a colorblind principle called localism. I suggest that it is defeated in the abstract by the realization of interdependency and the sense of transformation on which that’s based. I believe the practical form interdependency takes can be found in a sharing of burdens called equitable regionalism, which is a kind of metropolitan equity. And finally, we have to live together.
However, what is entailed in reaching such a sense of community and shared history leads us right back to the incredible lure of this strange candidacy and the appeal of a man with a very foreign name who many of us hardly know, and who is obviously and not so obviously black, but who comes to us from some other portal, which we might for convenience call “cultural or political mulattohood,” and all kinds of folks are buying in.
So, I’ll begin in a hopeful way and celebrate a few aspects of Barack Obama’s so-called post-partisan, post-racial candidacy before I muddy things up with Katrina, poverty, death and the imperative of interdependency…
II. The Post-Partisan, Post-Racial Black Man
The results from the South Carolina primary have been in for a while and it is now clear to everyone that Bill Clinton is not and never was the first black president. I always thought it was a stupid thing to say. When black comics said it, it wasn’t funny. When one of my great sheroes Toni Morrison said it, it could not be explained or repeated. And whenever it was said, it was spoken by somebody who obviously could not imagine this day in their lifetime. The comment—which was made only by other blacks and meant as a compliment—reflected how hungry African-American voters have always been for a white political leader who respected us in a familiar and genuine way, who understood black vernacular and was comfortable with it, whose friendship we culd trust. It was much more than the particular troubles in his background, his saxophone playing on the Arsenio Hall Show or the way he was prosecuted for his sexual indiscretions. Bill Clinton performed the role of president differently towards blacks; he viewed us as no powerful white leader of the free world had ever done before. And the sheer absurdity of the remark proved how important it was for many of us to believe in his goodwill—even when the evidence seemed (and sometimes was) to the contrary.
But Barack’s candidacy is really upon us. And although I would never have called Bill Clinton black even in jest, I was among those who thought that the moment of a potential black presidency, certainly a black male presidency, was far from near. I thought I understood this country better than that. And now I am glad to say maybe things will be better than we thought. I am not surprised, however, that a majority of black voters have firmly changed sides.
None of this is to talk about Barack today from the perspective of my personal politics and the vote I’ll cast. Instead, I want to relish instead the ability to link black-history-in-the-making with American history-in-the-making, as we always should during Black History Month reflections. It is a living history, and we must comment on our lives as they happen. I want to think about it in terms of the racial codes it has revealed so far, like Bill Clinton’s relationship to black voters. I want to challenge its theme of transformative change in a country that continues to let Katrina happen. And specifically, I want to point up this candidacy’s significance for its flirtation and kinship with the idea of colorblindness.
Colorblindness
Colorblindness has always been a slippery idea—part high ideal, part historical cleanser, part invitation, part strategic excuse to say no again. It is an idea as unstable as the condition of integration to which it often alludes. When Martin Luther King referred to being judged and accorded opportunity by the “content of one’s character,” we understood the appeal to our common humanity, and that colorblindness almost naturally meant the transcendence of arbitrary racial and ethnic and religious dividing lines on the way to an expectation of equality. But at the same time it was the moral mask of moderate Southern suburbanites resisting desegregation orders following Brown v. Board of Education in a more discreet way than boorish massive resisters. Colorblindness is almost never invoked anymore by black leaders, the very meaning of the term having been subverted in most practical struggles by people who accompany the term with claims of reverse racism and opposition to affirmative action. People like Ward Connerly and Justice Clarence Thomas, who of course are black. In the most charitable reading of their use, they espouse an ideal of colorblindness to dampen white defensiveness to any suggestion of being blamed for racism—which is pretty automatic—and to liberate black people from the stigma of black identity. Theirs is an almost fearful use of the principle. Colorblindness is a contested good. You praise it at your risk unless you don’t know better, or you praise it with such passion that you render skeptics invisible. You say it like Santa, because it would be so nice to cherish if only it could be real. And only occasionally, it is too wonderful for words.
Barack Obama stands in the middle of all this with an extraordinary grace and poise, a unique clarity about what he wants to do and about who he thinks we are. He was recently caught up by his comments about Ronald Reagan, whom he called a “transformative political figure,” and the joke was on all of us because what he succeeded in doing, we see now, is defining himself for us in one clear term that cuts right through. Barack is a transformative political figure, probably much more than Reagan ever was. Barack’s story is the embodiment of the colorblind high ideal, delivered by a biracial man who nevertheless claims his black identity. Look at him gaze back at you from magazine covers, listen to him match thought with vernacular on the stump: He knows he is beautiful, he knows he is brilliant, he knows he possesses something desperately needed in this country. And that confidence is catching in a culture that has never been good at finding it in itself. Barack Obama’s inspirational candidacy represents the long-sought euphoria of unification described in universal as well as non-racial terms. What makes it so authentic is that he not only knows where he comes from, he knows what he is: He is the union of black and white, the mestizo union of foreign and native, as well as a striver up from, well, if not the very bottom, then he could see the bottom clearly enough to unite the wish for class privilege with the promise of its attainment.
Assiduously, he speaks for all, knows a little something about everybody in the room, refusing ever to recount the bromides of simple racial affiliation. He just won’t do it, will never be caught doing it and defies you (or the Clintons) to bait him or his admirers into doing it. In this, we are experiencing a kind of political or cultural mulattohood, which leads by personal example and is a living symbol of togetherness more powerful than his poetry. Political mulattohood promises transformation and requires trust; it has never been a campaign value before. Depending on how it interacts with others, it may become radical pluralism—who knows? However, the multitudes of pundits, bloggers and New York intellectuals like to call it something else, not colorblindness, but “post-partisan” and “post-racial.” Barack, they assert, is running a post-partisan, post-racial campaign for the U.S. presidency.
There is a real difference between these ideas. A post-partisan, post-racial polity may not yet be possible for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment, yet political mulattohood could be real, but by no means easy and it treads very, very lightly. In fact, Barack’s political mulattohood may be what made a white man again out of Bill Clinton, at least to many blacks who adored him enough to co-opt him. Let me explain what I mean by that. We know that Barack is black. He only needed to say it once. He is, like me, biracial, but he understands the construction of his American racial identity to be black—and there is no contradiction in that. Yet many black folks needed to be sold on it; his nominal foreignness, in particular, was a sticking point. His newness and the fact that he seemed to come out of nowhere, without the blessings of the black political old guard (even though by having been both a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer he had exactly demonstrated his support for and service to old guard principles). It was not clear who could claim Barack—whites, blacks, Kansans, Kenyans. That all changed when Hillary Clinton found her voice in New Hampshire. Yet note that unlike Barack, Hillary Clinton could openly embrace her gender; indeed, she could perform it in that diner the day she almost cried.
When I say “perform” I am not insinuating that she was acting. [We understand a lot of things by racial and gender performance, right? All students of color know what it means when somebody says you’re “acting white” when you speak well or ace a test. And lots of black men who have no desire to be a thug wear a thug look and walk sideways so their pants can fall down just far enough to show the world their behind even if they’re not the kind to want to show the whole world their behind. They have to act like they do for some reason until they’re liberated from all that. Well, Hillary was no different.] I mean that her conduct represented a kind of performative womanhood that at least many white female voters in New Hampshire were looking for. It was very public, and it clearly helped her connect to voters. She could even talk about her leadership with respect to race, invoking Martin Luther King in a complicated point about presidential leadership under Lyndon Johnson. It became painfully obvious that Barack himself could not. Not for a minute. It would be instantly too black, even a little bit. Hillary dared him to. (Say it, Barack! Say I offended not just your principles but your identity!) Because the moment he did, the moment he so much as intimated in code that he is the brother we have sought, his candidacy dies a very violent death in the minds of the voters. He loses his cross-over appeal, which, I suspect, Hillary understood and with this understanding baited Barack into making even more of her remarks about King and Lyndon Johnson.
The candidates campaigns are like vituperative Greek choruses. Hillary’s campaign, you recall, backed away from the remarks once it became clear that many black voters (and lots of Americans) found the comments offensive or at least poorly reasoned. She hurried to clarify any mistaken understandings. Yet, as soon as Barack’s campaign issued a statement mildly criticizing the implications of the comment, Hillary attacked. Her campaign was appalled that Barack’s would attempt to use the remarks for political gain, that it would exploit the issue of race, or, in the rotten language learned during the O.J. Simpson trial, that Barack was somehow playing “the race card.” (What does that term mean and why do we repeat the metaphor of a mere card game unless we are committed to devaluing all the struggle over race this country has endured?)
That might have worked for Hillary if it had ended there. That might have revealed for us little more than the weakness of being a black candidate with a colorblind identity in a real live campaign. Barack backed down quickly. Both he and Hillary were reprimanded in the next debate and seemed equally contrite. Even though she started it, Barack was kinda stuck.
Ah, but along came Bill Clinton who dutifully performed white manhood. He took executive control of the situation. He supervised the facts. Bill Clinton got red-faced and angry in defense of his wife against the (black) man who might limit her aspirations. He went too far. He polarized without charm. He threw his good will on the flames. He belittled black voter judgment, black leadership gains like Jesse Jackson’s historic runs, and perhaps most of all he called Barack a “young man.” (“Young man” may be the post-modern version of boy.) However, as the conflicts persisted, you could sense a very real test for Barack. Despite his double-digit victory in the South Carolina primary, it seemed a narrow. Barack Obama could have come undone. He could have become an “angry black man,” a status from which there is still no known return.
All of this was a very critical moment in this campaign, and we are unlikely to see such overt racial references again. We should understand it while it’s still happening to us. Because, even before we get to Katrina, there is a paradox about Obama’s appeal that demands scrutiny. We know since South Carolina that he is still winning, that a wide cross-section of Americans passionately voted last Tuesday to join what some freely call a “movement.” And the question is still what is it you really want from this? The question goes beyond Barack Obama in the sense that so many voters are moved to elect change and may be looking for the best vehicle for change. But what is it you really want changed? If it is to undo colossal mistakes like a war in Iraq or Guantanamo or government secrecy, then it is not so hard to figure out. But is this truly a movement for structural change, race change, class change, real transformations in our relationships to each other based on our constructed prejudices, our unearned advantages and disadvantages? It seems like if we were serious about all that we would have done more before. We would have continued talking about it at least, yet long ago we stopped. Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent Hillary Clinton, are mainstream liberals—as they say—and liberal ideas have been mocked into obscurity. Why would the electorate really want to go there now?
Barack’s Paradox
The paradox of Barack Obama is that his wish for hope draws from that desire for social justice at a time when he can barely say so. He had to back away when he probably didn’t want to. And that is just him. That is just the protection or maintenance of whatever he represents for us, but it is not us. I take nothing away from him. What I’m guessing held him back was a deeply engrained understanding about who brought him together in the first place: a racial union between his parents, reconciled by both love and struggle. Any marriage is that anywhere, but Barack’s parents’ union as an interracial union at that time may have a symbolic significance he lives like a sustaining metaphor. Whatever they did wasn’t easy. Whatever it is lasts through him. And if it works it works because of a perceived interdependency, a partnership of sometimes deeply opposed interests. If I’m right, then Barack “performed” admirably during the race-baiting test with the Clintons. It looked like a commitment to the interdependency of interests that he embodies in his identity.
But our transformation together is different that what any one of us symbolizes. Most of the issues about which we yearn for transformation might be called environmental issues. A lot of stuff beyond our interiors is environmental. It’s not just aquifers and wetlands and carbon emissions. It’s also always the environment in which are children are educated. The environment in which we commit ourselves to work. The environment in which are voices are heard, our ideas emerge, our growth is made. Beyond that, it’s the environment for our material stability, like credit markets and housing affordability and service delivery and personal safety. And in those aspects of the environment which count for so much, we have not cared to come together very much. These are the parts of our environment where racism and economic exploitation took root, where its long-term manifestations live on as persistent effects even when we are less conscious of them, or no longer even intend them. We no longer talk about them with any ease or fluency. Generations of school children are taught to ignore these difficult subjects under the guise of colorblindness. Pluralist platitudes, obligatory bromides, Kwanzaa celebrations and workfare condemnations fill the void of straight talk about the obvious. Perception is blinded. How many ask why the managers are always white? How many ask why the maids are always Mexican? How many wondered why Katrina’s homeless were not simply relocated to higher ground nearby rather than cast about the country? All this common evidence of routine inequality evokes the challenge of environmental change. It has been right in front of us for years. If so many of us are so ready for this kind of change, what was stopping us before?
Obama’s candidacy has symbolic significance here because that kind of commitment to interdependency, to the notion that we are all in this life together, could just be the hopeful basis for transformation and the renewal of our social contract. But if it is, that will depend on how we resolve the very American tragedy of New Orleans.
III. Katrina and the role of race and class
Long before Hurricane Katrina revealed that this nation is far from a post-partisan, post-racial state, the City of New Orleans almost became a model of a colorblind human community. It held post-racial aspirations even before the Civil War. The city of Homer Plessy, the octoroon man (or radical creole) whose hopeful but ill-fated act of civil disobedience gave us Plessy v. Ferguson, was a crucible of race mixture during much of the 19th century, before and after emancipation in 1865. The city was known for its integrated neighborhoods of whites and blacks, free and slave; it was a place in which the terms whiteness and blackness signaled multiple identities. [The familiar racial binary we know as black and white was resisted in New Orleans; it was against the urban culture of a port city surrounded by swamps and subject to bad weather. Eventually, it would give American culture some of its greatest achievements—in Reconstruction Era assertions of racial equality and human dignity, in the utilization of Progressive Era drainage and public health techniques, in the creation of a singular art form, jazz music.] With its myriad influences—French, Spanish, Haitian, Italian, German and Protestant American—the city almost became a model of urban admixture and social harmony. [Life in New Orleans required an acknowledgment among its citizens of a higher degree of interdependency than in many places, especially across the South. It was late to fall to segregation along the familiar binary color divides.] It was slow to become American, defined by the typically adversarial racial and economic geography in which what is good for the middle class is antithetical to the interests of the poor; and what is good for whites is not so good for blacks. But it did.
The story of New Orleans’s turn toward Americanization and its harsh effects on the black poor is longer than I have time to tell, and there are others who do it much better. But I can tell you that very rational planning techniques colluded with market power to create favored and disfavored spaces that were clearly identified by race, and that these developments were for half of the 20th century reinforced by racially discriminatory laws. It is also clear that black people—whether Creole or not—became black a short time after white people—Creole of not—became white. Racial mythology constructed racial identity in New Orleans, as it did everywhere, and racial identity constructed the social and physical landscape. What is interesting, however, are the non-racial exclusions that produced a more durable form of racial segregation after World War II and, most importantly, after Brown v. Board of Education was decided.
By this I mean that what consolidated segregated living patterns inside New Orleans after Brown and up to the present is the same array of mostly race neutral factors that have sustained segregation in most American metropolitan areas even today. These have to do with suburbanization. I realize that suburbanization refers to people living outside the central city of New Orleans, but that is where white people went in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. They went to the virtually all-white parishes surrounding the city as soon as the highways were built and the subdivisions were drained. Blacks did not follow because blacks could not follow, kept out by restrictive covenants, zoning regulations and the severely bad attitudes of a not-ready-to-be-post-racial generation of homeowners protecting the character of their community. The laws and the legal principles that sanctioned these systematic barriers to black entry in the New Orleans suburbs is known in local government law as “localism.”
Localism is perhaps the soul of American residential life now that we are a suburban nation. It is the belief in local control of community character as the best way to ensure the growth and maintenance of the American Dream. It is more idealized than the wish for racial harmony, because it is both imagined and real, as real as a mortgage, a lawn with children playing safely, a street free of trucks, the sound of a school bell, the sight of a low tax bill, and lots of other good stuff. But most of all, localism is about exclusion and community defensiveness. In the exercise of democracy, its rules about incorporation, school finance, land usage, and boundary making allow for municipalities to answer only to insider preferences. But I am not attacking localism per se. It has helped to provide wealth accumulation and economic stability for millions of middle-class households since at least WW II. The model works well unless the aggregation of local choices routinely discriminates against the opportunities afforded others, who are identifiable by race or class or both. It works nicely until the externalities of so many self-interested choices start to choke off the resources of neighboring municipalities. That is what has happened.
It is important to note that it happened in ways that produced racial results without the accompanying racial animus. For many people, it discriminated unconsciously. It was a meritocratic way of life, an American Dream. It was merely a defensive and exlcusionary, yet democratic, well-respected, wealth-accumulating path to perfecting citizenship. For our hope today of transformation, that may be the toughest thing about it.
Resegregation
One of the many generalizations made about Barack Obama is that he comes from a generation that didn’t grow up with segregation. Well, that’s my generation, too, and I can tell you that we did and his daughters and my daughters still do, but no one dares call it that. Segregation, I argue, is what localism hath wrought, only in non-racial terms. The proof, however, is in the death of cities and their poorest neighborhoods. Most cities die slowly, death by death, usually by black people alone in the street after decades of tax-base abandonment and an overdose of drugs. Yet no city died like New Orleans when, after forty years of toxic squalor and bankrupt leadership, over a thousand deaths happened suddenly, adrift in the streets.
Between 1950 and 2000, New Orleans became a black city, losing two-thirds of its white residents and becoming—like Baltimore, Gary, Detroit and other post-industrial cities—two-thirds black. Whites either fled or were lured by good deals to a suburban periphery that has sprawled across the states over the decades, sprouting office parks for a service economy, low-density subdivisions and an endless lust for bigger houses and good tax ratables. Blacks and Latinos now live in suburbs, too; it’s just that they tend to inhabit older, “inner-ring” suburbs from which middle-class whites have also moved on and where services decline amid rising poverty. Back in the central city, an increasingly irrelevant group of persistently poor people live in segregated, isolated, concentrated poverty. They own virtually nothing, they are monitored by public institutions, their schools are deficient, their rates of illness are stifling, their wages are insufficient, their resources are thin, and life there is routinely stressful dangerous. They are disproportionately black.
August 2005, Hurricane Katrina
Along came Katrina and washed them into view for a global audience. For a few months beginning in August 2005, the public conceded we were not a post-racial nation. From the slow federal response to the limbo-producing policies of FEMA and HUD, it was also clear that we were not a post-partisan country either. Political partisanship in the form of a Republican president responsible for the rescue of black residents of a Democratic city joined with structural racism and economic marginalization to reveal the erosion of the American social contract. The Katrina survivors were so, so black. They were so black that National Guardsmen helped them with guns drawn. They were so black that the media told lies about their savage conduct in the Superdome. They were so black that it was hard for the public not to believe the media. So black that the desperate wresting away of family members from each other looked for a moment on CNN like slavery. And they were so poor that they still cannot return home, dispersed randomly to towns in Texas, Arkansas, rural Mississippi and Louisiana, in cell block-sized trailers fouled up by formaldehyde. Displaced to a diaspora that is also overwhelmingly black and extremely poor and where the concentration of deficits will show up soon in the statistics on drug and alcohol dependence, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, domestic violence, poor school attendance and performance, juvenile crime, asthma, diabetes. Just like Newark and Oakland and Chicago and Atlanta. They did not go willingly. They do not stay in those places because of a separatist desire to live away from the mainstream, or for gang membership or “reverse racism” or ghetto pathology or some other mythical reason that sounds in a lack of personal responsibility. No, they will struggle where they are, most of them, because they have no choice. The presidential candidates call them “voiceless,” “disempowered.” They call themselves “survivors.”
The distance between survivors and ourselves is the measure of our social contract. If it did more than feel good to speak of American life as post-racial, I surely would. But I don’t know what that means. Does “post-racial” mean that we’ve gotten behind the significance of race in distributing resources and respect? Does it not imply that racial categories have lost their descriptive force and no longer reflect reality in any useful way? Is a post-racial reality the attainment of a fair consensus, that most of us can finally say race is tangential to our beliefs about others and no longer frames our social ties nor conditions our judgments? How many of us have to believe that’s so in order to call this reality post-racial? Would we call our transformation that?
To me, the term suggests a dangerous, self-serving comfort that comes too soon before the transformation that will merit its use. It is hard to imagine that life and perspective for Katrina survivors is post-racial. The storm’s exiling of so many poor black people to far away will not render New Orleans post-racial. Numbers will never measure post-raciality, not while over 2 million Americans sit in prisons that are surely not post-racial. The communities from which inmates come and to which they will return, all those folks, they’re not post-racial yet. For the one-third of blacks in poverty, life is not yet post-racial, nor is it for the millions more who are close to poverty. Was a subprime lending spree that deliberately targeted black and Latino borrowers to fuel global economic wealth and will now decimate struggling minority middle-class neighborhoods with mass foreclosures post-racial? And are the law schools where black and brown students still barely register amid the entering classes post-racial? Or the vast majority of law firms where those students hope to work? Is Iowa post-racial because its nearly all-white voting population preferred Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton? And we could do the same Socratic exercise about post-partisanship, too, couldn’t we—showing how the rhetoric obscures the reality in potentially dangerous ways for the voiceless, disempowered survivor-types who are not covered by the generalization?
Transformation
Let me suggest something else. It is not antithetical to transformation to acknowledge the continued existence of racial and economic segregation. It is not being somehow racial or partisan to call the conflict what it clearly is. And most of all, there is no reason not to hope for reconciliation, mutual respect and cultural transformation. If we are headed down the road of post-racial unification, then good. Hold hands and let’s do this. But recognize that this is not some euphoric road. It is not joy, it is not easy, it is not yellow brick just because we wish to have it at last. What assists black aspirations for economic opportunity assists all outsiders.
The same is true for post-partisanship, it seems to me. Partisanship, like localism, is not merely greed against good. Moreover, it is competing convictions about self-interest, drawing tribal lines in the asphalt with machetes. It’s the madness of mythological differences played out in daily life. Yet I believe that what helps the poor can help the middle class—and the middle class needs help.
There is a way to unify by drawing heavily upon the hope of coalescing interests and honest appraisals of each other. I mean this in both a personal as well as a collective way, but I’ll conclude with how to imagine this kind of transformation in a collective way. We’ve got to end segregation in this country and dismantle the jurisprudential edifice on which it stands. I know that sounds kind of old and pre-“post” and almost nostalgic, but segregation by race and economic status is exactly behind most of the ills we talk about in this nation. The imbalance of resources among municipalities in our states—especially between central cities and favored suburbs—is untenable and unjustifiable on rational grounds. The inequities have truly squeezed beyond the border of race to undermine working- and middle-class areas, many of them suburbs. Our local government laws and public finance mechanisms produce shocking inequities; they also destroy the natural environment, promoting waste and sprawl. Meanwhile, the tangle of crime, unemployment, decaying infrastructure and economic irrelevance that characterizes many older central cities where a majority of blacks still live is simply beyond the resources of the most responsible, ethical and efficient city government to fix. I think the jig is up.
What we have now is interdependency, and it is time to see it and act upon it. That is where the two strands of my talk today come together. We may not have the love that brought Barack Obama’s parents together, but we have the interdependency of interests. My hope is that declining suburbs can see a mutuality of political interests with other cities in their regions and overcome the fetishism of border control. When municipalities act like islands, they inevitably allow public benefits to flow unevenly to those with the greatest leverage; this despoils the social contract. It promotes a self-serving myth that what is good for my community cannot be good for yours. It sustains ghettoes, segregation, sprawl and resource inequity. But people are hurting. The middle class is hurting. They have run out of space to run away to, and it is time to see how the wealthy are subsidized by localism. Their residents would be better off if municipalities within a region shared burdens, rather than attempted to externalize them infinitely. Eventually, that strategy runs out of space. Our fates are linked.
In recent scholarship, I have proposed something called “equitable regionalism” to deal with the problems of localism and segregation. In a nutshell, this is a principle of state-based local government law reform that discourages municipal defensiveness—or NIMBYism—and mandates a greater sharing of burdens and benefits along the hard equity issues. Those issues usually boil down to housing, school-district membership and tax revenue sharing. The housing part is especially important, and not just in terms of integrated residential relationships. The best attribute of localism is the sense of belonging and voice that comes with stakeholder ship. People need to own a stake in their communities, and their communities need to be defined more broadly. This can be done with things like inclusionary zoning, limited-equity cooperatives, housing trust funds, urban growth boundaries, density incentives, living-wage regulations and serious enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. They can work in central cities undergoing gentrification as well as in suburbs trying to manage growth. Ultimately, the goal is not only that people go to work and school and shop together; they really have to live together.
Which at last brings us back to this idea of hope delivered so rousing by the person and the candidacy of Barack Obama. I do not mean to slight what amazement Hillary represents for this nation. Her rise is absolutely tremendous, quite wonderful in its long-term implications for destroying stereotypes, deepening our conversations about gender and eradicating pervasive misogyny and the dehumanization of girls and women. Barack, however, has been speaking directly to hope and unification, he has boldly put the issue in play, and it is astounding that this black man has received such a national welcome while delivering such terrifying threats. Maybe things will be better than many of us thought. Inspiration is a rare and wonderful thing without which it’s hard to accomplish much that’s difficult.
But realistically, the kind of change that qualifies as transformation demands sacrifice all around. Transformation is the proverbial two-way street, if not the four-way intersection. It goes both ways. We will not be transformed if I expect only you to transform. This was a problem with integration, when so often change meant only blacks would move towards whites. This is the blindness of colorblindness when we mean only dark skin will go unseen. Transformation will be traumatic and unsettling. It will require tremendous patience and courage to figure out how to give up something just shy of one’s essence or one’s fears. It will make fairness hard to know exactly. It will demand a different ear. Transformation will insist that we meet in the middle of things even as those middles shift beneath us. I suspect that we will have to move in together. I mean, we will have to live together. We will have to commit to living in the same environments together because transformation will almost certainly require from each of us more than a colonial charity with which we forgive others their flaws and go home, but that we accept how each of us, wherever we are and whatever we have, is deeply implicated in this lopsided mess we’ve made, that we may have to sacrifice a cherished sense of normalcy for a good beyond our known worlds, suck it up, express our faith as we have not done before and only then embrace a looming interdependency from which we must never, ever let go.
Thank you very much.