Whatever happens next, something happened on November 4 that can’t be undone: black people and white stood beside each other, clapping, smiling and crying while Barack Obama, an African-American, accepted the presidency. Never before have black people in our country been united with white people in achieving a goal of such magnitude. Their gains have always been made with the government and a relatively few white people, such as civil rights workers, helping them push back against an indifferent or hostile white majority.
November 4 was different. African Americans and the white majority gave each other a gift by electing a black man president of the United States and shattering the “white ceiling.” Out of that may come good things not even foreseen yet, but here’s one example of what’s to be hoped for.
When this reporter was working in Springfield during the 1990s, an African-American politician had a tight grip on the Winchester Square neighborhood. He had a relative who was a Springfield Housing Authority official, while he (the politician) owned a laundromat near several SHA family housing projects.
At one point the relative, citing vandalism, shut down the laundromats in the projects, forcing women, many of them black, to take their washing to the laundromat owned by the pol. The Advocate also learned that a woman who ran a popular Winchester Square restaurant moved it to another part of town because, she said, this politician was constantly pressing her to use her restaurant to do him favors.
Multiply those anecdotes by hundreds and you get a glimpse into the opportunistic politics that make poor people poorer in minority-populated areas. Minorities give up on the majority culture and fall back on leaders of their own race, who use that power to create fiefdoms for themselves, saying in effect, Stick with me, you’ll get nothing from whitey. Take away the discrimination at the top and that power declines; hope like air comes into these ratholes. Hope and a new kind of trust between black people and white can be better than law enforcement as an antidote to crime and corruption. It can make a difference here.
