The Audacity of Hope

around to guide the kids, keep them in school, teach them respect. So these boys just
raise themselves, basically, on the streets. That’s all they know. The gang, that’s their
family. They don’t see any jobs out here except the drug trade. Don’t get me wrong,
we’ve still got a lot of good families around here…not a lot of money necessarily, but
doing their best to keep their kids out of trouble. But they’re just too outnumbered. The
longer they stay, the more they feel their kids are at risk. So the minute they get a
chance, they move out. And that just leaves things worse.”
Mac shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking we can turn things around. But I’ll
be honest with you, Barack—it’s hard not to feel sometimes like the situation is
hopeless. Hard—and getting harder.”
I hear a lot of such sentiments in the African American community these days, a frank
acknowledgment that conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of
control. Sometimes the conversation will center on statistics—the infant mortality rate
(on par with Malaysia among poor black Americans), or black male unemployment
(estimated at more than a third in some Chicago neighborhoods), or the number of black
men who can expect to go through the criminal justice system at some point in their
lives (one in three nationally).
But more often the conversation focuses on personal stories, offered as evidence of a
fundamental breakdown within a portion of our community and voiced with a mixture
of sadness and incredulity. A teacher will talk about what it’s like to have an eight-yearold
shout obscenities and threaten her with bodily harm. A public defender will describe
a fifteen-year-old’s harrowing rap sheet or the nonchalance with which his clients
predict they will not live to see their thirtieth year. A pediatrician will describe the
teenage parents who don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeding their toddlers
potato chips for breakfast, or who admit to having left their five- or six-year-old alone at
home.
These are the stories of those who didn’t make it out of history’s confinement, of the
neighborhoods within the black community that house the poorest of the poor, serving
as repositories for all the scars of slavery and violence of Jim Crow, the internalized
rage and the forced ignorance, the shame of men who could not protect their women or
support their families, the children who grew up being told they wouldn’t amount to
anything and had no one there to undo the damage.
There was a time, of course, when such deep intergenerational poverty could still shock
a nation—when the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America or Bobby
Kennedy’s visits to the Mississippi Delta could inspire outrage and a call to action. Not
anymore. Today the images of the so-called underclass are ubiquitous, a permanent
fixture in American popular culture—in film and TV, where they’re the foil of choice
for the forces of law and order; in rap music and videos, where the gangsta life is
glorified and mimicked by white and black teenagers alike (although white teenagers, at
least, are aware that theirs is just a pose); and on the nightly news, where the
depredation to be found in the inner city always makes for good copy. Rather than
evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of
fear and outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our
prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the black
homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital—we take these