Black Man, White Woman

Black Man, White Woman A black man and a woman running for president in the US... such crude emphasis on identity is delusional

Nicole Goodwin fought in Iraq only to come back to New York two years ago and find herself homeless. She walked the streets for several weeks, from shelter to shelter, with her one-year-old child, Shylah, strapped to her chest and their worldly possessions strapped to her back and crammed into a pram.

“What America thinks of as freedom and what I think of as freedom are two different things,” Goodwin told me at the time. “I want to get a house, day care and go to college. My freedoms are small. But I can’t give up… The ideals of this country are that anybody could come back to America and make a better life… ” At its heart the American dream has always been the triumph of possibility over probability — the idea that anyone could do anything trumps the reality that the overwhelming majority have only limited choices. Hope defeating cynicism and often masquerading as delusion.

That contradiction seems most stark when displayed on the chests of young black boys with T-shirts announcing: “Future President of America.” In a country where every president has been a white man and, at current rates, one in three black male babies born in 2001 are destined to go to prison, a more realistic T-shirt would read: “Future inmate of Riker’s Island.” But who would want to dress their child in that? When the probabilities are so bleak and the possibilities so remote, hope and delusion can start to look like two sides of the same coin.

But if the polls are anything to go by, then those T-shirts may finally come into their own next year. Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic field with the black Illinois senator, Barack Obama, mounting an impressive challenge in second place. The most recent surveys show that if you pit either one against any of the Republican candidates, Clinton or Obama would win. The symbolic importance of such a victory should not be denigrated… Less than half a century ago, black Americans endured certain humiliation and risked death just so they could vote. Both Clinton and Obama stand on the shoulders of giants. But it should not be overestimated either. What they are should not be mistaken for what they might do. It’s neither their race nor gender that makes them progressive — it’s their agenda…

Excerpted from a piece by Gary Younge in The Guardian, July 23