The Audacity of Hope

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.
It helped that these men knew me well; the four of us had served together in Springfield
during the previous seven years and had maintained a weekly poker game whenever we
were in session. It also helped that each of them prided himself on his independence,
and was therefore willing to stick with me despite pressure from more favored white
candidates.
But it wasn’t just our personal relationships that led them to support me (although the
strength of my friendships with these men—all of whom grew up in neighborhoods and
at a time in which hostility toward blacks was hardly unusual—itself said something
about the evolution of race relations). Senators Link, Jacobs, and Walsh are hard-nosed,
experienced politicians; they had no interest in backing losers or putting their own
positions at risk. The fact was, they all thought that I’d “sell” in their districts—once
their constituents met me and could get past the name.
They didn’t make such a judgment blind. For seven years they had watched me interact
with their constituents, in the state capitol or on visits to their districts. They had seen
white mothers hand me their children for pictures and watched white World War II vets
shake my hand after I addressed their convention. They sensed what I’d come to know
from a lifetime of experience: that whatever preconceived notions white Americans may
continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able—if given the
time—to look beyond race in making their judgments of people.
This isn’t to say that prejudice has vanished. None of us—black, white, Latino, or
Asian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially
stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black work ethic. In
general, members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the
degree of our assimilation—how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to
the dominant white culture—and the more that a minority strays from these external
markers, the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions. If an internalization of
antidiscrimination norms over the past three decades—not to mention basic decency—
prevents most whites from consciously acting on such stereotypes in their daily
interactions with persons of other races, it’s unrealistic to believe that these stereotypes
don’t have some cumulative impact on the often snap decisions of who’s hired and