Center for Minority Health

Waiting to exhale
Why black America is afraid to hope for a President Obama

March 2, 2008
By: Joseph Williams
The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON - A few days ago, after she cleaned my teeth, my dentist turned her small talk to politics. What was said - and what wasn't - was a microcosm of how African-Americans are talking about Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

"A lot of surprises, huh?" she said, a sly grin crossing her face.

Yes, I answered. A lot of surprises.

A headline in this month's Ebony magazine spelled out our unspoken conversation: "In Our Lifetime - Are We Witnessing the Election of the Nation's First Black President?"

The question, it seems, is on the lips of most African-Americans these days, anticipation that Obama may smash what generations believed was an unbreakable barrier: a black man in the White House. Given Obama's remarkable 11 straight primary or caucus wins, his packed campaign rallies, and Hillary Clinton's struggling campaign, one might expect giddy anticipation rippling through the black community.

Instead, there is an almost palpable anxiety. Conversations about how Obama is tantalizingly close to the presidency are muted, not celebratory, tamped down by a mixture of cynicism and fear.

Clinton, a formidable politician, might rebound. Obama could stumble. Conspiracy theories bubble: Political maneuvering or party bosses will torpedo him. Or, the unthinkable - an assassin - might strike at an open-air rally, personally preventing the first black presidency.

As Obama's campaign sweeps across America with the promise of reconciliation and a strikingly different face in the White House, it has revealed something else in black American culture: a deep-seated fear of hope.

Behind that fear lies an ordinary human trait, the instinct to protect against disappointment. But in black America, as the presidential race is revealing, long historical cycles of hope and disappointment have woven that impulse into the culture itself.

"It even happened to me, and I'm an educated PhD," said Stephen B. Thomas, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Minority Health. After realizing Obama was a legitimate contender with an excellent shot at the White House, "I said to my wife - I looked her in the eye - and I said, 'Is it OK for me to hope?' "

In 1938, black America waited in anticipation as boxing legend Joe Louis fought a rematch against the German heavyweight Max Schmeling. The fight came not long after Schmeling - Hitler's champion - had knocked out Louis in the 12th round, and it was billed around the world as a clash of civilizations.

Louis crushed Schmeling in just one round, and black communities nationwide exploded in a release of pent-up frustration. There was dancing in the streets, literally. Louis's victory still stands as an iconic moment in black history.

But it also stands as a stark exception. More typical has been rising anticipation dashed by reality. After the Civil War, the promise of Reconstruction, which led to former slaves serving in Congress, was crushed by a white backlash that produced Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. A century later, Martin Luther King's leadership of the civil rights movement, which won him a Nobel Peace Prize, was shattered by an assassin's bullet. The gains his movement made - ending segregation, promoting equality, creating a black middle class - have been eroded, in the eyes of most blacks, by the rise of conservatives and the perception that those gains went too far.

So black Americans are watching the Obama campaign with their breath held, afraid to believe too much, Thomas said. "There's a certain cynicism that any person who's been oppressed would feel, because we've been disappointed."

That defense has become what he considers "a [mental] health issue" among blacks. The emotional shield, he said, has been handed "from one generation to the next, by word of mouth: 'Don't get your hopes up."'

The tension between hope and resignation cuts across human experience, said Christine Carter, executive director of the Greater Good Science Center, a University of California-Berkeley think tank devoted to the study of happiness and compassion. It is learned behavior, and fairly common.

"It's saying, 'I'm not being optimistic about this - I know better, I have learned,"' said Carter, who is white. "It's saying, 'I'm not dumb. I'm realizing how slim the odds might be . . . and yet."'

That an anticipated positive event can produce drastically conflicting emotions is well known among sports fans; just ask any devoted Red Sox fan about the '86 World Series. Protecting oneself against anticipated emotional pain has earned its own catch phrase: hoping against hope. Eventually, if the potential pain seems too much, then hope itself begins to feel dangerous.

In a sense, Barack Obama seems to know this. His most recent book is called "The Audacity of Hope." He pushes the theme in filled-to-capacity rallies that pundits compare with religious revivals, and in soaring speeches that cause some to faint.

After an initially cool reception, support for Obama among black voters has blossomed, particularly since he won the caucus in Iowa, one of the nation's whitest states. He drew record percentages of the black vote in Georgia and South Carolina primaries, and some polls set his support among those voters at better than 80 percent.

But support is different from true belief that he can win. And as the Obama campaign marches on, a very specific set of fears has grown with it. Some are simply political: Clinton and John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, are both strong opponents, and McCain has a head start on the November election. Then there's the so-called Bradley effect: Whites who tell pollsters a black man has their vote - until they enter the ballot booth.

Other fears are slightly less rational: Will Obama be undermined by a vast, white-majority conspiracy? Will he be ambushed by a "dirty trick"?

But much discussion in coffee shops and bookstores centers on the biggest fear: That white America will not accept a black president, and will use violence to prevent it. Black people point to the fact that Obama was granted extensive Secret Service protection early in the primary campaign - an unusually strong reaction to a still-undisclosed threat.

"My barber, matter-of-factly and without hesitation, said they're going to shoot Obama, if it comes to that," a close friend wrote in an e-mail a few days ago. "The execution of our messiahs is a tragic continuum. We're always looking for a metaphorical Red Sea to come crashing down on us."

Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson said the image of King's murder, etched in black America's consciousness, justifies the stubborn anxiety. Personally, Wilson said, he's convinced Obama is well protected, but that doesn't erase the fear: "I'm black. I woke up in the middle of the night worrying about it."

But how should African Americans - perhaps witnessing a watershed moment few could have imagined - balance the need to hope against a long, painful history? And what is lost in the bargain?

"That's a very important question," Carter said. Without hope, she said, "the person's already devastated. We have some really rotten things in our history. We want a culture that fosters hope that we can move away from those things, that we are getting better."

Thomas said there are signs that shift may already be starting. With Obama's mounting success, he says, he has noticed a slight change in African-Americans' collective decision to buttress hope with cynicism.

The codes typically spoken between blacks in "mixed company," he said, are yielding to more open conversation - blacks talking with whites about an Obama presidency. Carter noted her own young children seem to sense "electricity" and a "profound" sense of change in the air.

And for black people who know the sting of hope yielding to disappointment, Thomas said, that change is "a little scary": "Is it possible," he asked, "we're in a new place and a new time?"

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