The Audacity of Hope

who’s promoted, on who’s arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about the
customer who just walked into your store or about the demographics of your children’s
school.
I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely held
than they once were—and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walking
down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’s
friend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have trouble
catching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have
no qualms about hiring him.
I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously unreliable.
And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After all, spending one’s
days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that many
minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round—the
feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as
individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit
of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world
requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she
stands at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires
the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly
white company.
Most of all, it requires fighting off the temptation to stop making the effort. Few
minorities can isolate themselves entirely from white society—certainly not in the way
that whites can successfully avoid contact with members of other races. But it is
possible for minorities to pull down the shutters psychologically, to protect themselves
by assuming the worst. “Why should I have to make the effort to disabuse whites of
their ignorance about us?” I’ve had some blacks tell me. “We’ve been trying for three
hundred years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”
To which I suggest that the alternative is surrender—to what has been instead of what
might be.
One of the things I value most in representing Illinois is the way it has disrupted my
own assumptions about racial attitudes. During my Senate campaign, for example, I
traveled with Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, on a thirty-nine-city tour of
southern Illinois. One of our scheduled stops was a town called Cairo, at the very
southern tip of the state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, a town made
famous during the late sixties and early seventies as the site of some of the worst racial
conflict anywhere outside of the Deep South. Dick had first visited Cairo during this
period, when as a young attorney working for then Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, he
had been sent to investigate what might be done to lessen the tensions there. As we
drove down to Cairo, Dick recalled that visit: how, upon his arrival, he’d been warned
not to use the telephone in his motel room because the switchboard operator was a
member of the White Citizens Council; how white store owners had closed their
businesses rather than succumb to boycotters’ demands to hire blacks; how black
residents told him of their efforts to integrate the schools, their fear and frustration, the
stories of lynching and jailhouse suicides, shootings and riots.