by Stuart Taylor Jr.

The Great Black-White Hope

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Whether Barack Obama would be a better president than Hillary Rodham Clinton, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney is an interesting and debatable question. But it is beyond debate that an Obama win in 2008 would be by far the best thing that has happened to African-Americans, and to race relations, in more than 50 years.

Obama embodies and preaches the true and vital message that in today's America, the opportunities available to black people are unlimited if they work hard, play by the rules, and get a good education.

Electing a charismatic, intellectually supercharged African-American president who preaches hope and opportunity would do more than anything else imaginable to tell young black people what they need to hear: This land is your land. And more than any other, it is a land of opportunity.

This is not the message that African-Americans have been getting over the past few decades from the media or from the "leaders" aptly described in the subtitle of the fine 2006 book by NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It.

One thing we can do about it is to focus attention on can-do black leaders and thinkers such as Barack Obama, former Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., Colin Powell, Cory Booker, Donna Brazile, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Thomas Sowell.

We can also relegate to the dustbin of history the snake-oil salesmen who have been anointed by the media as the leaders of black America, even as they have used their prominence to poison race relations while (in many cases) living high on the hog. These include Jesse Jackson, aptly dubbed "an extortion artist for the grievance elite" by black conservative Shelby Steele; Jackson competitor Al Sharpton, the dishonest demagogue who rose to prominence by orchestrating the infamous 1987 Tawana Brawley "rape" fraud; NAACP Chairman Julian Bond and much of the rest of the current leadership of that deeply degraded shell of a once-noble organization, which even now is emulating Sharpton by doing its utmost to keep alive the collapsing Duke lacrosse team "rape" fraud; the victimologist professors who dominate most university departments of African-American studies; and the fatuous slavery reparations movement.

"It is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us," as Bill Cosby told the annual convention of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in 2004. "It keeps you frozen in your hole you are sitting in."

Yes, a shamefully large percentage of black children do not get good educations. But that is not because of residual white racism. Indeed, some of the nation's worst—and most lavishly funded—schools are run by black-dominated local governments. Nor is "white privilege," to borrow the jargon of race-obsessed professors, a major obstacle to black success today.

Another benefit of electing Obama would be to help shrink that residue of white racism to vestigial proportions. How would white racists explain away the intellectual distinction that brought Obama high honors at Harvard Law School and the presidency of its prestigious law review?

It's true that many African-American voters eye Obama warily. One reason is that jealous black "leaders," rightly in fear of being eclipsed, suggest that he might not be "black enough." There is also something to Peter Beinart's assertion in The New Republic that for a man such as Obama, "the more whites love you, the more you must reassure your own community that you are still one of them. And the more you do that, the more you jeopardize your white support."

For this reason Obama, like every other Democratic presidential candidate, must pay ritual obeisance to Sharpton and Jackson lest he offend the many black voters who still identify with them. But he seems deft enough to do that without falling into the trap of dignifying the lie that white America is still oppressing black America.

What of the fact that this son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan, raised in Indonesia by his mother and stepfather, and in Hawaii by white grandparents, has not fully felt what it is to be a descendant of American slaves? None of that matters much. Obama's soaring success should tell black children everywhere that they, too, can succeed, and they do not need handouts or reparations. It should tell those white Americans who still don't get it that people with African blood can and regularly do achieve at the highest levels.

It should not take an Obama presidency to drive home these lessons. But the myth of continuing African-American victimhood still has the power to wilt the hopes and aspirations of more children every day.

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