process work, if not always smoothly, in the Altgeld Gardens public-housing
project, where a group just like this one had managed to register new voters, rally
residents to meet with city officials about asbestos contamination, and persuade
the mayor’s office to fund a neighborhood job-training center.
The heavyset woman sitting next to me bounced a toddler on her knee and
did nothing to hide her skepticism. She inspected Barack with her chin lifted and
her bottom lip stuck out, as if to say, Who are you to be telling us what to do?
But skepticism didn’t bother him, the same way long odds didn’t seem to
bother him. Barack was a unicorn, after all—shaped by his unusual name, his odd
heritage, his hard-to-pin-down ethnicity, his missing dad, his unique mind. He
was used to having to prove himself, pretty much anywhere he went.
The idea he was presenting wasn’t an easy sell, nor should it have been.
Roseland had taken one hit after another, from the exodus of white families and
the bottoming out of the steel industry to the deterioration of its schools and the
flourishing of the drug trade. As an organizer working in urban communities,
Barack had told me, he’d contended most often with a deep weariness in people
—especially black people—a cynicism bred from a thousand small
disappointments over time. I understood it. I’d seen it in my own neighborhood,
in my own family. A bitterness, a lapse in faith. It lived in both of my
grandfathers, spawned by every goal they’d abandoned and every compromise
they’d had to make. It was inside the harried second-grade teacher who’d
basically given up trying to teach us at Bryn Mawr. It was inside the neighbor
who’d stopped mowing her lawn or keeping track of where her kids went after
school. It lived in every piece of trash tossed carelessly in the grass at our local
park and every ounce of malt liquor drained before dark. It lived in every last
thing we deemed unfixable, including ourselves.
Barack didn’t talk down to the people of Roseland, and he wasn’t trying to
win them over, either, by hiding his privilege and acting more “black.” Amid the
parishioners’ fears and frustrations, their disenfranchisement and sinking
helplessness, he was somewhat brashly pointing an arrow in the opposite
direction.
I’d never been someone who dwelled on the more demoralizing parts of
being African American. I’d been raised to think positively. I’d absorbed my
family’s love and my parents’ commitment to seeing us succeed. I’d stood with
Santita Jackson at Operation PUSH rallies, listening to her father call for black
people to remember their pride. My purpose had always been to see past my