from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer
blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to
concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black
child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our
own sense of self-worth.
Ruby shook up this predisposition of mine, the wall I had erected between psychology and politics, the state of our
pocketbooks and the state of our souls. In fact, that particular episode was only the most dramatic example of what I
was hearing and seeing every day. It was expressed when a black leader casually explained to me that he never dealt
with black contractors (“A black man’ll just mess it up, and I’ll end up paying white folks to do it all over again”); or in
another leader’s rationale for why she couldn’t mobilize other people in her church (“Black folks are just lazy, Barack-
don’t wanna do nothing”). Often the word nigger replaced black in such remarks, a word I’d once liked to think was
spoken in jest, with a knowing irony, the inside joke that marked our resilience as a people. Until the first time I heard a
young mother use it on her child to tell him he wasn’t worth shit, or watched teenage boys use it to draw blood in a
quick round of verbal sparring. The transformation of the word’s original meaning was never complete; like the other
defenses we erected against possible hurt, this one, too, involved striking out at ourselves first.
If the language, the humor, the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities,
economies would have to be built, then I couldn’t separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered
inside us. And it was the implications of that fact, I realized, that had most disturbed me when I looked into Ruby’s
eyes. The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of
great odds, hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out
of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within
each person and at the center of which stood white people-some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face,
sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives. I had to ask myself whether the bonds of
community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams. Could Ruby
love herself without hating blue eyes?
Rafiq al-Shabazz had settled such questions to his own satisfaction. I had begun to see him more regularly, for the
morning after DCP met with the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training he had called me up and launched into a
rapid-fire monologue about the job center we had asked for from the city.
“We gotta talk, Barack,” he said. “What y’all are trying to do with job training needs to fit into the overall
comprehensive development plan I’ve been working on. Can’t think about this thing in isolation...got to look at the big
picture. You don’t understand the forces at work out here. Is big, man. All kinds of folks ready to stab you in the back.”
“Who is this?”
“Rafiq. What’s the matter, too early for you?”
It was. I put him on hold and got a cup of coffee, then asked him to start all over again, more slowly this time. I
eventually gathered that Rafiq had an interest in having the new MET intake center we’d proposed to the city locate in
a certain building near his office on Michigan Avenue. I didn’t ask the particular nature of that interest: I doubted that I