Audacity of Hoping

As soon as my jam-packed plane hit the ground in Washington, I instantly felt a kind of shift in the air. D.C. has long been called the "chocolate city" for its large number of African-American residents. But on this particular weekend—the historic one before the swearing-in of the first African-American president—the city was transformed into a sort of chocolate Disney World. The streets were filled with thousands of smiling, almost giddy, brown faces. Young and old wandered joyfully and endlessly in the freezing cold, searching for any souvenir with Barack Obama's face on it. "This is what hope looks like," I remarked to one of my friends as we walked by a man selling T shirts with a picture of the White House and the slogan THE BLACK HOUSE.

Ever since Barack Obama and his family hit the national scene two years ago, African-Americans have balanced our greatest hopes against our fears of disappointment. Would he run? Would he win the nomination? Would he, could he, win the presidency? On the broadest level, Obama has fulfilled our dreams just by taking office. African-American boys I know in South-Central Los Angeles who wore cornrows and once dreamed of nothing more than living to the age of 18 without being shot down are now entering barbershops to ask for the no-nonsense Obama haircut. Teenage girls I mentor who once yearned only for a date with someone who lived "the thug life," are now giving the nerd in the front of the class a second look.

It's a transformation so mind-boggling that no one could have convinced me it was possible even a year ago, particularly in low-income areas of African-American communities where "hope" and "possibility" are words rarely heard. "I just feel so much like the rest of my life can be different now,'' says 23-year-old Elise Ryan, a high-school dropout, single mother of two and resident of the Jordan Downs housing projects in Los Angeles. "Obama's message was always about hope from day one, and at first I was like 'whatever.' But the more I saw him and his family, I was like, OK, maybe he can make things better for me. Maybe he can change the way black people get treated.''

Obama fueled dreams like Ryan's with his lofty campaign rhetoric. And African-Americans—many of whom long ago lost faith in politics—listened. We became willing to believe again in a government that hasn't always treated us fairly. But the strange and sometimes dangerous thing about hope is that it can disappear even faster than it arrives. Now that President Obama is a reality, we have to confront a whole new kind of calculus. As he settles into the Oval Office, Obama faces two international wars and the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, with job losses that soar by the week. With desperation, Americans of all races and backgrounds are counting on him to solve their problems. Depending on our expectations, African-Americans may be in for a stinging reality check.

Though Obama never promised us anything specific, we just assumed that because he's African-American, he will put our interests near the top of his agenda. "Obama didn't run as a black president," says jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. "The media did that. He didn't run on a black platform, so it makes no sense to expect anything other than him being the best man for the job and being able to do it well. That's all we can expect from him as black people." Indeed, his top issues are our issues: joblessness, home foreclosures and lack of health care all resonate within the African-American community.

But there are other, more-parochial issues that many African-Americans will expect Obama to acknowledge at some point. There's the "three-strikes rule" that lands more than its share of young African-American men in jail in many states. The tougher and longer prison sentences blacks receive for sometimes minor drug offenses. And the growing number of black women with the AIDS virus—now the fastest-growing segment of those infected. "Those are things I'm sure Bush didn't give a hoot about,'' says 34-year-old Lisha Crenshaw, a Chicago elementary-school teacher I ran into in D.C. "The number of jails we're building to put our young men in instead of investing that money into their future and schools to educate them is so sad. And the AIDS epidemic was big news when white men were dying of it. But when black women have it, no one cares. Obama needs to care.''