The Audacity of Hope

Today not only is the city filled with black doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and
other professionals, but blacks also occupy some of the highest management positions
in corporate Chicago. Blacks own restaurant chains, investment banks, PR agencies,
real estate investment trusts, and architectural firms. They can afford to live in
neighborhoods of their choosing and send their children to the best private schools.
They are actively recruited to join civic boards and generously support all manner of
charities.
Statistically, the number of African Americans who occupy the top fifth of the income
ladder remains relatively small. Moreover, every black professional and businessperson
in Chicago can tell you stories of the roadblocks they still experience on account of
race. Few African American entrepreneurs have either the inherited wealth or the angel
investors to help launch their businesses or cushion them from a sudden economic
downturn. Few doubt that if they were white they would be further along in reaching
their goals.
And yet you won’t hear these men and women use race as a crutch or point to
discrimination as an excuse for failure. In fact, what characterizes this new generation
of black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what they can achieve. When a
friend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office
decided to start his own investment bank, his goal wasn’t to grow it into the top black
firm—he wanted it to become the top firm, period. When another friend decided to
leave an executive position at General Motors to start his own parking service company
in partnership with Hyatt, his mother thought he was crazy. “She couldn’t imagine
anything better than having a management job at GM,” he told me, “because those jobs
were unattainable for her generation. But I knew I wanted to build something of my
own.”
That simple notion—that one isn’t confined in one’s dreams—is so central to our
understanding of America that it seems almost commonplace. But in black America, the
idea represents a radical break from the past, a severing of the psychological shackles of
slavery and Jim Crow. It is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rights
movement, a gift from those leaders like John Lewis and Rosa Parks who marched,
rallied, and endured threats, arrests, and beatings to widen the doors of freedom. And it
is also a testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whose
heroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their lives in
jobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and saving to buy a
small home; parents who did without so that their children could take dance classes or
the school-sponsored field trip; parents who coached Little League games and baked
birthday cakes and badgered teachers to make sure that their children weren’t tracked
into the less challenging programs; parents who dragged their children to church every
Sunday, whupped their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out for
all the children on the block during long summer days and into the night. Parents who
pushed their children to achieve and fortified them with a love that could withstand
whatever the larger society might throw at them.
It is through this quintessentially American path of upward mobility that the black
middle class has grown fourfold in a generation, and that the black poverty rate was cut
in half. Through a similar process of hard work and commitment to family, Latinos
have seen comparable gains: From 1979 to 1999, the number of Latino families