Disintegration - The Splintering Of Black America Part 3

I had decided that I couldn't watch the unfolding Hurricane Katrina catastrophe on television any longer. I had to see it for myself, and I had to write about it. So I caught a flight to Baton Rouge, rented a minivan-I wanted an SUV, but for obvious reasons they were in great demand-and headed off down the interstate toward a city I'd last seen when I was in college and a bunch of us had decided to see what Mardi Gras was all about. I knew that the first post-flood evacuation flights out of the submerged city were supposed to leave that day, so I found my way to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. As I neared the terminal, it was as if I had suddenly been transported to some other country.

With more than a quarter of a mile to go, I drove past the end of a long line of people who looked like third world refugees. They bristled at that description, I later learned. They were citizens of what we insist is the greatest country on earth, they were beneficiaries in good standing of vaunted American exceptionalism, and the greatest country on earth would not allow any force, natural or man-made, to reduce its citizens to the helpless, pathetic status of refugees. The greatest country on earth would not countenance the scene I saw that day: thousands of people, virtually all of them black, carrying everything they owned on their backs or in battered suitcases, shuffling forward inch by inch in a sad, silent queue to be put on military aircraft that would take them somewhere, anywhere, as far as possible from the h.e.l.lhole into which fate had plunged them. It wasn't something that anyone would ever see in America. Yet here we were.

I parked near the long, crescent-shaped terminal and rapped on the first door I came to; like all the rest, it was guarded by uniformed personnel wielding automatic weapons. My press pa.s.s got me inside, and immediately I had second thoughts. The smell was overpowering: waste, decay, death. The terminal was dim, still mostly without power, and it took awhile for my eyes to adjust. What was normally a soaring atrium, meant to be evocative of glorious flight, had been converted into a field hospital-a MASH unit, like on the old television show but without the gallows humor. There were rows of cots occupied by patients. All that I could see were black, all were elderly, and some appeared to be in extremis. I b.u.t.tonholed a doctor, and he gave me a status report: A few overwhelmed physicians and nurses were trying to care for hundreds of very sick people. They had no medical histories to guide them. In the many cases involving some degree of dementia, they couldn't even be sure of the patient's name. They weren't able to diagnose, only guess; and whether they guessed right or wrong, there wasn't much they could do except make the patient as comfortable as possible. Even basic medicines were lacking, including insulin-and the doctor was certain that many, if not most, of the men and women on those cots were diabetic. A man on a nearby cot was gasping for breath; the doctor asked if someone could please try to find a functioning oxygen tank.

I had to get away from the smell, so I walked through the atrium to the next segment of the long terminal. This was where that wretched line I'd seen on the way into the airport eventually led-past deserted ticket counters and shuttered souvenir shops to a gate and a jetway, somewhere on a far concourse, that led to a flight. Who knew where the plane would be going. At this point, who cared?

Katrina and its aftermath shocked the nation not only because of the fearsome meteorology we witnessed but also because of the shocking demography. That there existed large numbers of African Americans who are not middle cla.s.s in income or outlook was something the nation knew, but for many people this fact had become increasingly abstract-useful as a statistic to cite in arguments about affirmative action, education policy, or national compet.i.tiveness, but not necessarily a relevant fact of daily life.

Katrina gave the numbers flesh and bone and blood. And voice: We're still here We're still here.

At the airport, I was watching Abandoned black Americans being uprooted, traumatized, and driven away in what looked almost like a pogrom. I took out a notebook and began interviewing people, and the first words I wrote were "state of shock"-that's where they all appeared to be. Every family whose privacy I invaded had a harrowing story of escape and survival. One woman told me how the water seemed to rise a foot each minute, how she and her husband ran upstairs and then climbed into the attic, how he used a hammer to make a hole that let them clamber onto the roof, how the two of them escaped the Lower Ninth Ward in a neighbor's boat, how they paddled and waded and finally walked the miles to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center downtown, and how they had endured three days there with no food or water except what strangers offered to share. One man said, with emotionless affect, that his family had become separated in the chaotic scramble; he had no idea where the others might be, but was sure they were all right. Another man was carrying one suitcase and his camera bag. He had lost everything else, he said, but he was proud of having saved the camera because he was convinced that the pictures he took during the flood would prove that "they"-he meant officials who were acting on behalf of those citizens who happened to be affluent, powerful, and, not incidentally, white-had deliberately sacrificed poor black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth by dynamiting certain levees in order to save the famous French Quarter and the wealthy Garden District. The man had shot film, not digital, so he couldn't show me the photographic evidence. I gave him my card but never heard from him.

A retired teacher named John Mullen III told me of one detail he remembered from the long hours he spent on top of his house in the Lower Ninth Ward: "There were redfish in the water, and they were coming up to eat the c.o.c.kroaches at the water line." It wasn't the image that stuck with him but the sound-a little slurp-and he couldn't get it out of his head.

I made my way slowly toward the front of the line, but after a while I stopped doing interviews. I couldn't process any more loss, couldn't bring myself to force any more broken families to talk about the dead and the missing. I needed air, so I ducked out the nearest door-and quite literally b.u.mped into Reverend Jackson, who had arrived in the disaster zone earlier that day. He was standing there, looking at the people in the line, the ambulances still arriving, the heavily armed National Guard troops, the exhaustion on the faces of victims and samaritans alike. A local news crew had spotted him and rushed over, certain he would offer a good sound bite. But one of the great talkers of our time had nothing to say. He and I greeted each other, then stood in silence for a while. There were no words.

The waters in New Orleans flushed out a long-ignored residue of black poverty and dysfunction for all to see. The nation felt a deep sense of shame, at least for a while. But the reality of Abandoned black America had been there all along-perfectly visible to those who cared to look.

Before the flood, two-thirds of New Orleans's population was black. The city was one of the poorest in the country; the official poverty rate was a staggering 27.9 percent, according to the authoritative Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, and some 84 percent of those poor people were African American.1 Nearly half of African Americans with incomes below the poverty line lived in neighborhoods where the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, according to a Brookings Inst.i.tution a.n.a.lysis-which meant that poverty was highly concentrated. Nearly half of African Americans with incomes below the poverty line lived in neighborhoods where the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, according to a Brookings Inst.i.tution a.n.a.lysis-which meant that poverty was highly concentrated.2 In other words, the racially segregated but economically integrated model for African American neighborhoods until the 1960s had given way to a new model-still racially segregated, as far as the Abandoned were concerned, but now economically segregated as well. In New Orleans as elsewhere, concentrated black poverty was accompanied by concentrated black dysfunction. Four out of every five children in these neighborhoods were being raised in single-parent households. Only three out of five working-age adults actually partic.i.p.ated in the labor market. Just one adult in twelve, in these Abandoned zones, had a college degree.3 The upwardly mobile black Mainstream was steadily moving out, either to the suburbs or to a newly developed sector of the city called New Orleans East. As the black population became poorer and less educated, it became more resentful. Mayor Ray Nagin, whose histrionics during and after the flood drew nationwide ridicule, had won election in the first place because he had the backing of whites, middle-cla.s.s blacks, and the powerful downtown business community. His credentials as a longtime corporate executive provoked more suspicion than admiration in Abandoned neighborhoods-places where people would notice the thunk thunk of car doors locking when a black corporate executive, perhaps having lost his way, rolled through in his s.h.i.+ny BMW or Benz. of car doors locking when a black corporate executive, perhaps having lost his way, rolled through in his s.h.i.+ny BMW or Benz.

There is no excuse for the behavior of the young men and women who, when the hurricane hit, rushed downtown to loot the stores. It is useful, though, to have a sense of how they viewed the world. For most Americans, New Orleans is synonymous with fun. The city's insomniac street-party culture is, indeed, unique and enchanting. But in Abandoned neighborhoods like Mid-City, Treme, and the Lower Ninth, the good times did not roll. The public schools were failing so hopelessly that a whole generation was effectively being written off. The exodus of the oil and gas industry was almost complete, which meant there were precious few jobs to be had except in the low-paying tourism sector. Drug dealing was what pa.s.sed for economic development in some neighborhoods. Black-on-black crime was a truly horrific problem-the city's murder rate regularly flirted with being the highest in the nation-and it seemed as if all the police wanted to do was contain the fire, not put it out. The authorities' main concern seemed to be making sure that violent criminals were kept away from the restaurants, casinos, strip clubs, and trinket shops of the tourist zone, lest the city's theme-park image suffer.

So the breakdown of order that Hurricane Katrina caused was more than an opportunity to steal. It was a chance for payback-not against any individual, not against any one retailer, but against a whole system. The rampage, such as it was, proved highly impractical. When the streets are under six feet of water, another name for "wide-screen TV" is "not-very-good raft."

At the airport and elsewhere, it was the Abandoned who insisted on the theory-which was baseless-that poor neighborhoods had been intentionally flooded so that rich neighborhoods could stay dry. I spoke with at least a dozen people who swore they had heard the explosions that demolished the floodwalls protecting the Lower Ninth. In fact, there were no explosions; the witnesses probably heard s.h.i.+ps, houses, concrete slabs, and other flotsam being smashed around by the inrus.h.i.+ng torrent. After I got back to Was.h.i.+ngton from covering the flood, I accepted an invitation to appear on Fox News for the first (and last) time. Bill O'Reilly used a column I had written as an excuse to ridicule the idea that anyone could think, even for one minute, that government officials would do such a thing as deliberately and callously flood American citizens out of house and home. I informed him that within the living memory of some of those Lower Ninth Ward residents, government officials had done just that: At the height of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, authorities dynamited levees south of New Orleans, ruining farmhouses and destroying crops, in a desperate and misguided attempt to save the city. O'Reilly paused for a nanosecond, then responded that, well, he didn't know about any of that...but he did did know that it was an know that it was an outrage outrage that people would that people would think think such a thing, and that it was such a thing, and that it was irresponsible irresponsible for a journalist to report that people were saying such for a journalist to report that people were saying such nonsense nonsense. As I said, that was my one appearance on Fox.

There was near-universal criticism of how Mayor Nagin handled the evacuation of the city in the hours before Katrina made landfall, but in many ways he orchestrated a great success; the vast majority of New Orleanians heeded the warnings and managed to get out. The early evacuees, however, included most whites, most middle-cla.s.s blacks, and a much smaller percentage of the poor. Those Abandoned black Americans who remained had been literally abandoned: They found themselves, basically, the only people left in town. The impression conveyed by much of the television coverage was of a bunch of poor black people who were too ignorant to get out of the path of the storm of the century-and who then, trapped in a Waterworld without laws or authority, reverted to savagery.

I knew better. The day after my trip to the New Orleans airport, I was back in the city-this time in the French Quarter, which had remained dry. I heard a breathless report on the radio warning people to steer clear of the Jackson Square area because a sniper was on the loose; police were said to be pinned down under heavy fire. That was odd, because I happened to be a block away, and I'd seen no evidence of trouble. I went over to the square and asked some loitering police officers about the "sniper," and they looked at me as if I were hallucinating. They had been there all morning. They were in communication with their colleagues around the Quarter. Nothing of the sort had happened.

There were reports of people firing at rescue helicopters-untrue, as far as I could determine. There had indeed been instances in which people stranded on their roofs fired weapons, but the flood victims I talked to said the shooters were trying to get the attention of the helicopters, not bring them down.

If you think about it, that's the only explanation that makes sense. But fear of the unleashed black unknown was not conducive to clear thinking. Rumors of phantom snipers led hapless federal officials-under the leaders.h.i.+p of the f.e.c.kless Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown-to organize their rescue crews into huge armored convoys comprising scores of vehicles. A convoy would set out in some direction, and the lead truck would inevitably reach a point where the water was too deep to proceed. Then an hour or more would be wasted while the whole convoy was turned around and pointed in some other direction. Soon the lead vehicle would reach deep water again, and the whole process had to be repeated. Precious time and resources were being squandered, all because of reports that somewhere, hiding in the ruined city, there might be poor African Americans with guns.

There were, indeed, many incidents of criminal violence-New Orleans was, after all, no stranger to crime before the flood. But I watched as young men wearing the "fear me" uniform-baggy pants around the hips, white T-s.h.i.+rts, cheap gold chains-helped distribute bottled water to exhausted families. I saw human beings pulling together to get through a crisis, just as human beings do all over the world.

There is no one explanation for how so many people ended up staying rather than leaving. It's true that transportation was a major factor for some. Anyone who didn't own a car, and couldn't get a ride from someone who did own one, was basically out of luck. By the time it had become clear that a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane strike was almost certain, as opposed to merely possible, other modes of getting out of town-planes, trains, buses-had ceased operating and moved their equipment to safety. Perhaps if Nagin had pressed all the city's school buses into service, thousands more might have escaped the storm. But that's not the kind of elaborate contingency plan that can be put together in an hour or two. Qualified drivers would have had to know when and where to report for duty. Would-be evacuees would have had to know to gather at pre-identified pick-up points. And, of course, there would have had to be someplace for the buses to go once they left New Orleans.

Most of the people I spoke with, though, had other reasons for deciding to hunker down. An unusually high percentage of poor African Americans in New Orleans own their homes rather than rent, and some were determined to protect their property against looting. The parts of the Lower Ninth Ward that are closest to the Mississippi sit on relatively high ground, and those streets had never flooded before Katrina; I met one man who made the reasonable, but unlucky, wager that history would prove a good guide. Several people told me that they had had the means to leave, but could find no way to safely move their elderly relatives who were housebound with chronic medical problems.

Like those who evacuated, those who stayed behind had chosen from among their viable options. They just had fewer of them.

How did those options become so very narrow? The story involves several interwoven narratives.4 Hurricane Katrina offers an apt a.n.a.logy, in that it was literally a "perfect storm" whose devastating impact depended on the synergy of unrelated factors. A ca.n.a.l built years ago to shorten the s.h.i.+pping route to the Gulf of Mexico hadn't been properly maintained, and as a result had widened greatly. As the hurricane neared, its winds blew at just the right angle to send a ma.s.sive surge of water coursing toward the city; ultimately that surge helped overwhelm the floodwalls that were supposed to protect the Lower Ninth Ward. Then, as the storm continued inland, it narrowly missed hitting New Orleans head-on, instead pa.s.sing a few miles to the east; this meant that while the hurricane had approached from the south, the most powerful winds, those closest to the eye, swirled in from the north. Those winds sent water from Lake Pontchartrain into several drainage ca.n.a.ls that puncture the city like daggers, putting unbearable pressure on the thin floodwalls that ran alongside the ca.n.a.ls. When those barriers failed, water from the lake, which is at a higher elevation than most of the city, poured in. All of these factors had to combine in just the right-or wrong-way for New Orleans to be turned into a giant bathtub with no drain. Likewise, it took a conspiracy of woe to create the human conditions that Hurricane Katrina unmasked. Hurricane Katrina offers an apt a.n.a.logy, in that it was literally a "perfect storm" whose devastating impact depended on the synergy of unrelated factors. A ca.n.a.l built years ago to shorten the s.h.i.+pping route to the Gulf of Mexico hadn't been properly maintained, and as a result had widened greatly. As the hurricane neared, its winds blew at just the right angle to send a ma.s.sive surge of water coursing toward the city; ultimately that surge helped overwhelm the floodwalls that were supposed to protect the Lower Ninth Ward. Then, as the storm continued inland, it narrowly missed hitting New Orleans head-on, instead pa.s.sing a few miles to the east; this meant that while the hurricane had approached from the south, the most powerful winds, those closest to the eye, swirled in from the north. Those winds sent water from Lake Pontchartrain into several drainage ca.n.a.ls that puncture the city like daggers, putting unbearable pressure on the thin floodwalls that ran alongside the ca.n.a.ls. When those barriers failed, water from the lake, which is at a higher elevation than most of the city, poured in. All of these factors had to combine in just the right-or wrong-way for New Orleans to be turned into a giant bathtub with no drain. Likewise, it took a conspiracy of woe to create the human conditions that Hurricane Katrina unmasked.

In the 1950s, the Lower Ninth Ward was a working-cla.s.s, mostly black community. By the time Katrina hit, the modifiers "working-cla.s.s" and "mostly" no longer applied. Half of all households in the neighborhood reported income of less than $20,000 a year, according to the 2000 census, with only about 13 percent earning more than $50,000 annually. More than 98 percent of the Lower Ninth Ward's residents were black.5 On a return visit to New Orleans four months after the flood, I met a cheerful and determined woman in her fifties named Janie Blackmon, who was working with a preservationist group to try to bring the ruined neighborhood back to life. She had grown up in Holy Cross, the part of the district nearest the Mississippi, and remembered when the Lower Ninth was home not exclusively to African American families like hers but also to a smattering of Italians and Jews. There was a thriving commercial strip, but not much industry; the Lower Ninth was a place where families owned their homes, where fathers got up every morning, said goodbye to the wife and kids, went to their jobs elsewhere in the city, and came home at night to a hot supper. Blackmon pointed to houses where the same families had lived for four or five generations. Everyone knew the big house where the Lower Ninth's most famous resident lived: the legendary musician Antoine Dominique "Fats" Domino. He stayed-and survived Katrina. Everything else changed.

Those working-cla.s.s jobs that had sustained the Lower Ninth disappeared. The acclaimed sociologist William Julius Wilson, now at Harvard and formerly at the University of Chicago, was a pioneer in studying the evolution of persistent black poverty in inner cities across the nation. Wilson argued in favor of the "spatial mismatch" theory that the migration of industry-indeed, of most economic growth-from central urban zones to the suburbs and beyond was the princ.i.p.al factor in the creation of what is sometimes called the black undercla.s.s. With few jobs available nearby for low-skilled or entry-level workers, with transportation a daunting ordeal for anyone without a car, and with no easy way for inner-city residents even to learn of employment opportunities in the burgeoning suburbs, joblessness in neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward soared.

That would seem to be the obvious consequence. But Wilson argued that the disappearance of work opportunities had another effect: Young women concluded they had little incentive to marry the fathers of their children, since the men were now unlikely to become steady breadwinners. Mothers decided they could do as well, or perhaps better, raising the children on their own. The result was that the two-parent household became just one of several possible living arrangements, rather than a standard enforced by the moral judgment of friends and neighbors. The single-parent, female-headed household-once considered a shameful way to live-became commonplace, then normal.6 Wilson's work is often cited as an answer to the theory, espoused by some conservatives, that welfare payments targeted at helping mothers who were living without male partners created an even clearer economic incentive for women not to marry. Those looking for a noneconomic explanation for the decline of the traditional nuclear family in Abandoned black America have often pointed to the dearth of s.e.x education and the infrequency of condom use among African American teens. But when a Pulitzer Prizewinning colleague of mine at The Was.h.i.+ngton Post The Was.h.i.+ngton Post, the journalist Leon Dash, spent a year living in one of Was.h.i.+ngton's most distressed housing projects, he found that the young girls who became pregnant were not confused in the least about how babies were made, and that condoms were readily accessible. Dash found that girls made the conscious decision to become pregnant for a variety of reasons. Single motherhood was often a multigenerational phenomenon. Some girls felt confined living with their mothers and siblings, and knew that having a baby would allow them to establish their own households-perhaps in a subsidized apartment just a courtyard away. Others were responding to a less practical but far deeper need for proprietors.h.i.+p: in a transient and precarious world, the sense that I made this and it will always be mine I made this and it will always be mine.

Whatever the princ.i.p.al reason, the phenomenon itself is undeniable. When Katrina hit the Lower Ninth, well over half of all households with children under eighteen were headed by a woman with no husband present. Only about 25 percent of children were living in households with both parents-about the same as the percentage of children in the Lower Ninth who were being raised not by a parent but by their grandparents. grandparents.7 The traditional family had broken down. The traditional family had broken down.

Other scholars have argued that "spatial mismatch" alone is not enough to explain how neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth devolved into the islands of extreme poverty and dysfunction that const.i.tute the archipelago of Abandoned black America. At the same time that jobs were moving out of the cities, African Americans were winning unprecedented rights and freedoms. Those who were best prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities moved away from places like the Lower Ninth, leaving the least-prepared behind. The 1960s riots hastened an exodus that had already begun. As the black Mainstream made for the exit, what had been economically diverse African American neighborhoods became uniformly poor.

Out-migration of the Mainstream doesn't seem to explain the full extent of the transformation, however. Some studies indicate that a greater effect may be produced by the movement of poor African Americans-people who, for whatever reason, have to find a new place to live. Poor black people, when they move, are likely to move into neighborhoods that are poorer and more racially segregated than the neighborhoods they are leaving. So what happens is a kind of distillation that effectively cooks off the middle cla.s.s and the working cla.s.s until only the Abandoned remain.

At the same time, though, these "destination" neighborhoods have thinned out: Low density, compared to the precivil rights days, is characteristic of Abandoned zones throughout the country, with block after block dotted with derelict buildings and vacant lots, like the gaps in a six-year-old's smile. This winnowing has been taken to an extreme in Detroit and its satellite industrial cities such as Pontiac and Flint, where the big question now is which parts of town to let nature reclaim. Like most cities from which industry has fled, New Orleans before Katrina had a much bigger geographical footprint than it needed-the city's population was about 475,000, down from a peak of 627,000 in 1960.8 The Lower Ninth Ward still had the fabric of a real neighborhood, but it was frayed and moth-eaten. The Lower Ninth Ward still had the fabric of a real neighborhood, but it was frayed and moth-eaten.

One last key factor in creating the conditions that Katrina exposed-the conditions in which Abandoned black America lives-is racial segregation. That sounds trivially obvious-in that we are considering black neighborhoods, not integrated ones-but it's not. All else being equal, we should expect to find poor black, white, and Hispanic people all living together in poor neighborhoods. But that is not the case. Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Ma.s.sey argues that racial segregation is the most important factor in the concentration of black poverty because African Americans have fewer housing options and are especially hard-hit in any economic downturn.9 All these factors had conspired to set the scene for Katrina. They did their work like experienced stagehands-efficiently and out of sight.

One reason the scenes from devastated New Orleans were so shocking is that in many metropolitan areas, the inner city isn't what it used to be. Quite often, it isn't even where where it used to be. it used to be.

Across the country, gentrification has turned dangerous, decrepit, close-in, once exclusively black neighborhoods into hip oases where the most outrageous crime is what coffee shops charge for a few drops of espresso mixed with some warm milk. This transformation is far from complete, it must be said, and there are cities where you could drive around for hours and decide that it hasn't made much of a dent at all. In Chicago, for example, vast sectors of the South Side are still unreconstructed ghetto, while in Baltimore whole neighborhoods of once-tidy row houses are abandoned, boarded up, and rotting away-the postapocalyptic cityscape familiar to viewers of The Wire The Wire.

It is also the case that only when the real estate market is booming do blocks of Harlem brownstones become prettified, and only when it's really really booming could a row of former crack dens in Was.h.i.+ngton metamorphose into a happening nightlife district, anch.o.r.ed by a chic bistro serving mussels, fries, and Belgian beer. When the housing market tanks, gentrification is put on hold. The process rarely goes into reverse, though. It works like a ratchet: Once seized, territory is seldom surrendered. Push by shove, eviction by foreclosure, poor people are moved from the center to the margins. booming could a row of former crack dens in Was.h.i.+ngton metamorphose into a happening nightlife district, anch.o.r.ed by a chic bistro serving mussels, fries, and Belgian beer. When the housing market tanks, gentrification is put on hold. The process rarely goes into reverse, though. It works like a ratchet: Once seized, territory is seldom surrendered. Push by shove, eviction by foreclosure, poor people are moved from the center to the margins.

At the same time, the Abandoned are pushed to the margins of our consciousness. There was a time when the status of the poor was a much-debated issue in American public life, if only because the non-poor were so afraid of them. Crime was seen as such an urgent problem that a generation of politicians won office by promising "law and order"-which was shorthand, I would argue, for protecting the rich and white from the poor and black. Zero-tolerance policing was invented, "three-strikes" laws were pa.s.sed, mandatory sentencing was imposed, and new prisons were built. A generation of young criminals either went straight, went to jail, or went to the grave, and the ultraviolent crack epidemic burned itself out. When was the last time any politician made "safer streets" the centerpiece of a campaign?

Since the early 1990s, the incidence of serious violent crime in the United States has fallen by nearly 40 percent, from 747 such offenses per 100,000 population in 1993 to 467 per 100,000 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.10 Some believe the decline is mostly a function of demographic trends; others credit the draconian laws and tough prison sentences; still others see a collateral benefit of economic growth. Whatever the cause-and despite the impression of unabated, rampant depravity and mayhem conveyed nightly by the eleven o'clock news-most people understand at some level that when they walk down the street these days, they have less reason to fear getting mugged than they did twenty years ago. Poverty simply isn't the menace it once was. Except in extraordinary circ.u.mstances-such as Hurricane Katrina-poverty just doesn't command the nation's attention the way it used to. Some believe the decline is mostly a function of demographic trends; others credit the draconian laws and tough prison sentences; still others see a collateral benefit of economic growth. Whatever the cause-and despite the impression of unabated, rampant depravity and mayhem conveyed nightly by the eleven o'clock news-most people understand at some level that when they walk down the street these days, they have less reason to fear getting mugged than they did twenty years ago. Poverty simply isn't the menace it once was. Except in extraordinary circ.u.mstances-such as Hurricane Katrina-poverty just doesn't command the nation's attention the way it used to.

So to find Abandoned black America today, you have to look a bit harder. You have to go to the corners of cities, to neighborhoods often neatly bypa.s.sed by the freeways and avenues that commuters use to get downtown. You have to find your way into shabby little pockets of the inner suburbs, where refugees from gentrification have found precarious sanctuary. You have to travel to the rural South and visit communities where upward mobility is marked not by building a Mitch.e.l.lville Mansion but by moving out of a shotgun shack into a reasonably new double-wide.

In Was.h.i.+ngton, the Abandoned have been pushed steadily eastward-and even out of town. In 1970, the city's population was 70 percent black; today, the African American majority is down to 54 percent, and it's still falling fast.11 In 2009, for the first time since the advent of local government in a city ultimately ruled by Congress, a majority of the elected city council was white. The District of Columbia can be called Chocolate City no more. In 2009, for the first time since the advent of local government in a city ultimately ruled by Congress, a majority of the elected city council was white. The District of Columbia can be called Chocolate City no more.

Thirty years ago, the desirable Capitol Hill neighborhood was expensive, mostly white, and just a few blocks wide. During each successive real estate boom, imaginative realtors pushed the boundary of Capitol Hill first to the east, in increments of several blocks at a time, then north all the way to the H Street corridor, which since the riots had been considered one of the most dangerous places in town. These days, I have to admit that the sight of a young Caucasian couple pus.h.i.+ng a baby stroller down artsy, avant-garde H Street gives me a jolt of cognitive dissonance. There was a time when I might have pulled over, asked if they had any idea any idea where they were, and perhaps even offered them a lift. Then again, I might have done the same for a yuppified black couple, since H Street was an equal-opportunity mugging zone. One of its alleys was the scene of a particularly heinous crime: In 1984, a forty-eight-year-old African American woman named Catherine Fuller was horrifically raped and murdered by a gang of young men in what might have been a scene from where they were, and perhaps even offered them a lift. Then again, I might have done the same for a yuppified black couple, since H Street was an equal-opportunity mugging zone. One of its alleys was the scene of a particularly heinous crime: In 1984, a forty-eight-year-old African American woman named Catherine Fuller was horrifically raped and murdered by a gang of young men in what might have been a scene from A Clockwork Orange A Clockwork Orange. Witnesses must have seen the attack and heard Fuller's screams, but n.o.body intervened. The killing was seen as a measure of the depths to which the city had fallen.

Today, Capitol Hill-the name, if not the elevation-extends all the way from the Capitol to the Anacostia River, a polluted, slow-moving estuarine tributary of the Potomac that cuts off nearly a third of the city from the rest. Row houses in the newly added precincts of Capitol Hill have been spruced up with all-stainless kitchens and polished hardwood floors. Decrepit old commercial buildings have been converted into faux-loft condos; Eastern Market, once an authentic place where locals went to buy everything from collard greens to crab cakes, has been turned into an "authentic" place catering mostly to people who couldn't tell a ham hock from a hog jowl if their lives depended on it. There are islands of poverty that remain, but they shrink year by year as longtime homeowners and landlords sell to developers with big ideas.

The Abandoned who lived on the flatland that Capitol Hill swallowed-like the Abandoned who lived around U Street, those who lived in the tenements around the industrial zone where developers built the city's new baseball stadium, those who lived in the suddenly trendy neighborhood north of Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue (inevitably called NoMa), those who lived in riot-scarred, now-revitalized Columbia Heights, and many others-have largely been pushed across the river. Everyone knows that "the river" in question is not the Potomac but the Anacostia.

Most of the millions of tourists who visit the nation's capital probably have no idea that this remote part of the city even exists. People often refer to the whole area east of the river as "Anacostia," but actually it's a vast sector made up of many distinct neighborhoods-Congress Heights, Barry Farm, Deanwood. The small historic district that is properly called Anacostia is where the black abolitionist Frederick Dougla.s.s lived; his hilltop home is now a national historic site. The panorama from Dougla.s.s's front door is one of the best in town, with the Capitol, the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, and the rest of the city's monumental core strewn at your feet; on the Fourth of July, it's as if the fireworks are for you alone. Such to-die-for views will inevitably attract hordes of gentrifying pioneers to what is an incongruously beautiful ghetto-heavily wooded, coursed with streams, dotted with parks-but so far the flow is a bare trickle. "East of the river" has always had pockets of Mainstream comfort, and they cling on. But it's the poorest and blackest part of town. It's where the Abandoned live.

It wasn't like that when I was growing up. Dorothy Fordham, a first cousin of my mother's, lived in a tidy house just off Alabama Avenue. She had a pioneering career as an officer in the army-few black women had ever advanced so far-and her stories of exotic postings and intrigue-filled a.s.signments were fascinating. Aunt Dorothy remained in that little house after she retired, and the neighborhood slowly sank around her. Longtime neighbors died or moved away, to be replaced by newcomers with less regard for niceties such as landscaping and maintenance. They were less neighborly, too: A few years ago, already past eighty, she was attacked and badly bitten by a pit bull whose careless owner lived down the street. Never the type to be pushed around, she held her ground until an incapacitating stroke forced her into an a.s.sisted-living facility. Now that she's gone, what will happen to her immaculate house?

"Law and order" is very much an issue east of the river; people who are poor and black have always suffered disproportionately from violent crime, much of it committed by people who are black and poor. A popular pastime among young men who live in one big housing project is stealing cars-to go joy-riding around the city, to have drag races on a notorious strip of highway in Prince George's County, or perhaps just as a way to pa.s.s the time. Drug dealing is seen as a regular form of commerce in some neighborhoods-not accepted but expected. East of the river is where most of the city's handgun shootings and murders occur, frequently as a result of longstanding feuds between "crews"-that's the word local authorities use to avoid calling them gangs, because acknowledging a gang problem would mean having to do something about it. The crews are based in different neighborhoods, to which they are fiercely loyal. Often the bullets fly during battles over drug turf, but sometimes it's just because some guys from, say, Barry Farm were seen promenading around Congress Heights in a way that somehow conveyed disrespect. The origins of such territorial disputes are lost in the mists of time, but they are important enough that schoolteachers have to know which kids live where, so they can arrange their cla.s.sroom seating in a way most likely to minimize conflict.

The pressures of the real estate market have begun to push the Abandoned and their attendant problems across the city line into Prince George's communities such as Capitol Heights. A jurisdiction proudly dominated by the black Mainstream is having to deal with an influx of crime, drugs, and violence-and has proved to be, generally, in no mood to make allowances for the socioeconomic disparities that give rise to criminality. Thirty years ago, the police force in Prince George's was overwhelmingly white and had a reputation for heavy-handed brutality in dealing with African Americans unlucky enough to be arrested in the county. Now, with the county under black leaders.h.i.+p and the police force about half African American, the reputation persists-and many residents ignore, if not encourage, what remains of the old "ready, fire, aim" approach to fighting crime.

In Abandoned zones on both sides of the Anacostia, the Mainstream inst.i.tutions that held out the longest were the churches. Before the Shaw neighborhood south of U Street began to gentrify, I remember that every Sunday morning the streets would be all but blocked by double-parked cars with Maryland license plates-paris.h.i.+oners who had moved out of the city but came back, once a week, out of loyalty to the churches they had grown up in and the pastors who had baptized them. But now those churches have begun to migrate to the suburbs-especially Prince George's-because that's where most of the members.h.i.+p lives. The traditional congregations have had to take this step for compet.i.tive reasons: Mega-churches, mostly Pentecostal in nature, have sprung up in the county and siphoned thousands of members away from Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, and other traditional denominations. One such place of wors.h.i.+p, Jericho City of Praise, claims nineteen thousand members. The church runs its own Christian academy and a host of social-service programs.

On Sundays, the traffic flow is reversed: In the Jericho City of Praise parking lots you will find quite a few cars with District of Columbia license plates. Some of those cars belong to Abandoned black Americans who are convinced that although this life may be hard, the next life will be pure comfort and joy.

The web of restraints that keeps Abandoned black Americans from escaping into the middle cla.s.s has been examined from every angle, described in great detail, and lamented ad infinitum. But the web continues to tighten.

It begins in the womb. Poor black women are only one-third as likely as poor white women to have adequate prenatal care. This is partly mitigated by the fact that poor black women are much less likely than their white counterparts to smoke while they are pregnant; indeed, rates of tobacco, alcohol, and drug use among low-income young African Americans are generally lower than among low-income whites. Still, infant mortality is almost twice as high among African Americans. The incidence of low birth weight is also greatly elevated, and while most studies do not show an ironclad, direct relations.h.i.+p between low birth weight and a decrease in cognitive ability, they do indicate that low-birth-weight children are up to twice as likely to have problems in school. From a very early age, the children of the Abandoned are at much greater risk for several chronic, debilitating conditions-asthma, obesity, childhood diabetes-than low-income white children. Poor black children are behind even before the race begins.

Most infants born into low-income African American families are, of course, of normal weight and go home from the hospital in good health. But what kind of home?

In 1940, only 15.7 percent of African American households nationwide were headed by women who were either single, widowed, or abandoned by their spouses. In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were growing up in one-parent households. Today, an astounding 54 percent of all African American children are being raised in single-parent households12-and, in almost all cases, it's the father who is absent while the mother struggles to take care of the family.

It is hugely significant that in most Abandoned black neighborhoods, as in the Lower Ninth Ward, most households are headed by a single woman-with no husband on the premises. In many cases, both the mother and the absent father were themselves raised by single mothers. To the extent that the example set by parents provides a model for children to emulate, girls grow up learning that it would be normal to raise children on their own and boys learning that it would be normal not to live with the mother-or mothers-of their children. The pattern tends to repeat in the next generation. Being a single parent is stressful, with the mother likely to pa.s.s that stress on to her children-along with all the well-doc.u.mented physiological damage that stress can cause. The complex and subtle psychological impacts of single parenthood might be surpa.s.sed, however, by a simpler and more quantifiable economic impact: One low income provides approximately half as much money as two low incomes. This fact of arithmetic limits upward mobility. It also greatly increases instability because the slightest disruption of a household's one precarious source of cash can create a situation in which the family has to move on short notice. And if a single mother who lacks educational qualifications and marketable skills is fortunate enough to have a steady job, it is unlikely to pay enough for her to afford quality day care. Preschoolers are likely to be cared for by relatives, neighbors, or older siblings, and while these ad hoc caretakers are full of love and good intentions, they will rarely have the skills needed to optimize a child's early development. As a result of all these factors, children of Abandoned families are at a significant disadvantage, compared to their more affluent peers, when they enter school.

William Raspberry, my friend and former colleague at The Was.h.i.+ngton Post The Was.h.i.+ngton Post, decided when he retired that blazing a trail for younger African American journalists to follow, becoming one of the most widely read syndicated columnists in the country, and winning a Pulitzer Prize did not const.i.tute enough of a contribution. So instead of taking up golf, he founded a nonprofit and set out to make a difference in his hometown of Okolona, Mississippi, a town of about 3,500 that is 60 percent black, mostly poor, and long since Abandoned. Raspberry decided to focus on early-childhood education, which is where he thought the greatest return on his philanthropic investment could be made. He soon discovered, however, that before he could effectively educate young children, he had to educate their families. As he learned more, parents became his program's main focus.

Raspberry's program, called BabySteps, teaches parents how to prepare their children for success in school. Raspberry found that it wasn't enough to invite parents to sessions where they would be given instruction. Counselors make home visits to a.s.sess the parents' capacity and demonstrate model behaviors for them to imitate. As Raspberry once explained to me, it does little good to tell parents to read to their children every night if the parents are not capable of reading with any fluency; some boys and girls would be better off if they came regularly to a BabySteps facility where counselors could read to them. Raspberry then discovered that health was another major issue, and BabySteps ended up establis.h.i.+ng a weekly health and dental clinic to serve the children of Okolona. This holistic approach seems to be producing real results. If there were a Bill Raspberry for every Abandoned community-and deep-pockets donors willing to fund programs like BabySteps, which costs more than half a million dollars a year-this would be a very different book.

Even if every young child in Abandoned black America had the best possible early preparation, most would encounter schools where expectations are low and performance is even lower. There is no need to describe in detail the abject failure of public education in poor inner-city and rural communities; everyone knows that tragic story by now, and at this point the only part anyone wants to read is the still-unwritten happy ending. I've spent enough time in such schools-as a reporter and columnist, and as a volunteer in a nonprofit college-access program that my wife, Avis, founded-to know that the few kids who overcome their surroundings, going on to success in college and beyond, are preternaturally self-motivated and almost always have solid, consistent, competent support from their parents. All else being equal, boys and girls from intact, two-parent families tend to do better-not just in school but in all walks of life.

There is a temptation, then, to prescribe marriage as the cure for Abandoned black America's parlous condition. I believe that's unrealistic. By all means, let marriage be a theme hammered home by every preacher, in every pulpit, on every Sunday. But the decline of marriage and the rise of single-parent households are society-wide phenomena, albeit with their greatest impact among African Americans. "Too bad your father's not around" is not a policy prescription; it's a cruel taunt directed at children who are already being victimized by forces beyond their control.

Despite dropout rates of up to 50 percent in some cities, most youths in Abandoned communities do manage to graduate high school. For those who don't, the information age economy has nothing to offer-you can't go down to the plant and sign up for a steady, blue-collar, union job with decent benefits, since the plant was shuttered years ago when this country stopped making things. If you're a young man and you drop out, you spend your days hanging out on the corner; your choice is validated and reinforced by neighborhood friends who took the same route. If you're a young woman and you drop out, you probably get pregnant and have a child; you want the very best for your baby, like every mother does, but you have no real idea how to provide it. Those who stay in school and graduate end up with diplomas that are devalued-and with basic skills that qualify them only for episodic, dead-end employment.

If you are a male dropout and you spend a significant amount of your time with like-minded acquaintances on the corner, there is an excellent chance that you will have opportunities to partic.i.p.ate in the illegal economy-the drug trade. Whether you partic.i.p.ate or not, being in proximity to the drug business when the police come around is enough to put you in contact with the criminal justice system. Out of 1.5 million prisoners incarcerated in the federal and state prison systems in 2008, an estimated 528,000 were black.13 The fact that the "statistic" about there being more black men in prison than in college is false gives only cold comfort, because it is indisputably true that the rate of incarceration for African American men-down substantially since the turn of the new century-is still more than twice the rate for Hispanic men and about six times the rate for white men. The fact that the "statistic" about there being more black men in prison than in college is false gives only cold comfort, because it is indisputably true that the rate of incarceration for African American men-down substantially since the turn of the new century-is still more than twice the rate for Hispanic men and about six times the rate for white men.

Is this somehow intentional? Is the system rigged to warehouse black men in prison? I would argue that mandatory sentencing laws and the differential treatment of offenses involving crack cocaine versus powder cocaine boost the African American incarceration rate, as does the fact that Abandoned black neighborhoods are generally policed with Fort Apachestyle aggressiveness. But I don't believe these factors are enough to explain the entire disparity. Family breakdown, untutored parenting, failed schools-all the factors that go into creating and perpetuating Abandoned black America have to be invoked to fully explain why our jails and prisons are full of black men for whom incarceration is almost a rite of pa.s.sage. The impact is more easily defined than the cause: Ex-offenders have even less chance than non-offenders of ever finding the elusive path that leads to the Mainstream.

And it is in Abandoned neighborhoods where the epidemic of violent crime still rages. The most critical problem was always black-on-black crime, not black-on-white; but it was only when whites and Mainstream blacks felt vulnerable that crime became a hotly debated political issue. Now, for most Americans, crime is distant and much less threatening. For Abandoned black Americans, however, crime is a fact of everyday life. One of the most disheartening developments of the past decade has been the establishment of standard rituals with which to mark the violent taking of a young life-among them, memorial T-s.h.i.+rts with a computer-silk-screened picture of the deceased, along with his or her dates of birth and death. In Was.h.i.+ngton, such occasions are common enough to make T-s.h.i.+rt shops among the most successful types of businesses in Abandoned black neighborhoods. Along with funeral homes, of course.

Movie critics loved the 2009 indie film Precious Precious. African Americans, not so much.

I shouldn't generalize. The truth is that Precious Precious divided black Americans-and divided us pa.s.sionately-along what by now are familiar aesthetic and cultural lines. There were those who celebrated the skill and artistry of director Lee Daniels, the powerful and unforgettable performances by Mo'Nique and ingenue Gabourey Sidibe, and even the brave choice by Mariah Carey, a diva's diva, to appear on-screen in unflattering makeup that included the subtlest hint of a mustache. With entertainment moguls Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry on board as executive producers-basically providing their imprimatur and their money-a film by and about black people had elbowed its way into Hollywood, the ultimate gated community, and taken the place by storm. Not only was the film wildly profitable, given its small budget, but it was in every sense excellent when judged by Hollywood's standards of excellence. divided black Americans-and divided us pa.s.sionately-along what by now are familiar aesthetic and cultural lines. There were those who celebrated the skill and artistry of director Lee Daniels, the powerful and unforgettable performances by Mo'Nique and ingenue Gabourey Sidibe, and even the brave choice by Mariah Carey, a diva's diva, to appear on-screen in unflattering makeup that included the subtlest hint of a mustache. With entertainment moguls Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry on board as executive producers-basically providing their imprimatur and their money-a film by and about black people had elbowed its way into Hollywood, the ultimate gated community, and taken the place by storm. Not only was the film wildly profitable, given its small budget, but it was in every sense excellent when judged by Hollywood's standards of excellence. Precious Precious was acclaimed as a great piece of cinema-which is, by definition, a grand illusion. It wasn't meant to be a doc.u.mentary. It was art and demanded to be seen and evaluated as art. was acclaimed as a great piece of cinema-which is, by definition, a grand illusion. It wasn't meant to be a doc.u.mentary. It was art and demanded to be seen and evaluated as art.

Then there were those who said: Sure, right, most of that may be true. The acting was good, depending on how thoroughly you like your scenery chewed, and young Sidibe was truly amazing. But Precious Precious wasn't art, it was a form of p.o.r.nography. wasn't art, it was a form of p.o.r.nography.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push Push by Sapphire by Sapphire is set in a specific milieu: the Abandoned black America of the nation's most lurid imagination. The story line, said the film's vocal critics, appears to have no more elevated purpose than the arousal of prurient interest: An obese, functionally illiterate teenager is raped and impregnated by her father-not once, but twice. The child born of the first impregnation has Down syndrome. Meanwhile, the girl is also being horribly abused, both physically and psychologically, by her mother, who is evidently one of the most evil and worthless individuals ever to walk the earth. The mother-also obese, incidentally-is the Angry Black Woman from h.e.l.l. She sees her daughter not as the pathetic victim she really is but as a rival for the affections of the violent, irredeemable monster-the Worthless Black Man from h.e.l.l-who so brutally rapes his own daughter. is set in a specific milieu: the Abandoned black America of the nation's most lurid imagination. The story line, said the film's vocal critics, appears to have no more elevated purpose than the arousal of prurient interest: An obese, functionally illiterate teenager is raped and impregnated by her father-not once, but twice. The child born of the first impregnation has Down syndrome. Meanwhile, the girl is also being horribly abused, both physically and psychologically, by her mother, who is evidently one of the most evil and worthless individuals ever to walk the earth. The mother-also obese, incidentally-is the Angry Black Woman from h.e.l.l. She sees her daughter not as the pathetic victim she really is but as a rival for the affections of the violent, irredeemable monster-the Worthless Black Man from h.e.l.l-who so brutally rapes his own daughter.

"It wasn't until I was at Sundance and this Chinese lady in her 60s started crying in my arms...did I realize this was a universal story. That was an epiphany," director Daniels said in a published interview.14 Universal? Really? The thing is, this tale of unimaginable horror, cruelty, ignorance, and dysfunction was not imagined to have taken place in San Francisco's Chinatown, the barrios of East Los Angeles, the WASPish Connecticut suburbs, the hills and hollows of Appalachia, the ranchlands of Texas, or any of a million other possible "universal" settings. These desperate creatures were poor and black, and to many people that seemed a striking coincidence. For there were remarkable echoes of a similar tale of incest, abuse, and depravity: The Color Purple The Color Purple, another critically acclaimed chronicle of woe set in the black undercla.s.s. In the case of Alice Walker's novel, it was the black undercla.s.s of the 1930s. Apparently, some things never change.

Interestingly, Winfrey was another thread connecting the two projects: She gave an Oscar-nominated performance in The Color Purple The Color Purple and later bankrolled a grand-scale adaptation of the work for the Broadway stage, years before she loaned her name-and brought much of her vast audience-to and later bankrolled a grand-scale adaptation of the work for the Broadway stage, years before she loaned her name-and brought much of her vast audience-to Precious Precious. When asked what drew her to Daniels's film, Winfrey told an interviewer that the protagonist reminded her of anonymous girls she would see on city streets through the window of her limousine-girls whose lives were "invisible" to her.

Winfrey has the standing to make such an observation (to my ear, terribly off-key), having bootstrapped her way from poverty and abuse to unimaginable heights-all the way from Abandoned to Transcendent. But still: What is it with the idea that black plus poor equals not just privation, not just dysfunction, but a pattern of behavior that can only be described as subhuman? What is it that audiences find so compelling about Grand Guignol depictions of African American poverty? Is some urge being satisfied, some itch being scratched? Is some preconceived notion being confirmed?

Or is guilt being a.s.suaged? Is society saying, in effect: Yes, we have turned our backs. Yes, we have left you adrift, knowing that many of you will drown. But look how you behave. Look how you really are. You deserve it You deserve it.

6

THE TRANSCENDENT: WHERE NONE.

HAVE GONE BEFORE.

In July 2009, President Barack Obama made the short trip to New York City to address the one-hundredth annual convention of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People. The centennial of the NAACP, the nation's largest and most important civil rights organization, was an obvious occasion for our first African American president to talk about race. Aware of my interest in the theme and the occasion, the White House press office arranged for me to interview the president at the Hilton in midtown right before he delivered his speech. I was on the train heading to New York when I got word that the interview had to be rescheduled-my fifteen-minute window had been slammed shut by more pressing obligations. Instead, I would be able to see the president the following afternoon at the White House.

I reported to the White House at the appointed hour, was buzzed through to the West Wing, and settled in to chat with my handlers; the president was running a few minutes late, dealing with one of the many cliff's-edge crises that his health-care reform initiative had to survive. Finally I was led through a maze of offices and antechambers to the inner sanctum. Obama greeted me at the door to the Oval Office. I sat down on one of the couches, looked around the most famous works.p.a.ce in the world, and had to take a couple of deep breaths before I could ask my first question. My profession requires cultivating a certain seen-it-all air, but I was pretty overwhelmed.

I got what I needed from the interview, and there were only two other moments when I had to pause for oxygen. The first was when I noticed a bust of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on a sideboard and realized that when Obama sat at his desk, making decisions that would touch all our lives, the bust would be in his direct line of sight. The second was when I noticed who else was in the room: top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett; her chief of staff, Michael Strautmanis; a press-office liaison, Corey Ealons; and the president of the United States. Everyone in the Oval Office at that moment, including the most powerful man in the world, was African American.

Obama's presidency definitively settles any question of whether a Transcendent black American elite has arisen-a small but growing cohort with the kind of power, wealth, and influence that previous generations of African Americans could never have imagined. Even the last stubborn skeptics must now admit that the Transcendents have arrived.

By skeptics, I refer to the Transcendents themselves. Their dazzling success hides a mountain of self-doubt that now, post-Obama, may finally be eroding.

The president was already Transcendent long before he moved his family into the White House. Being one of just three African Americans ever elected to the Senate is more than enough to qualify. What I found fascinating was how many of his fellow Transcendents were not just unsupportive of his "premature" or even "presumptuous" run for the presidency but actively hostile to it. The first black president began his campaign over the opposition of most of the black political and economic establishment.

The most Transcendent black American of all-pre-Obama, that is-was a notable exception. Oprah Winfrey, whose fortune Forbes Forbes has estimated at more than $2 billion, presides over a vast entertainment and lifestyle empire whose centerpiece had long been her eponymous syndicated talk show, watched by between six million and seven million viewers every day. With her show, her magazine, and her other ventures, she had earned political capital over the years and kept it like a h.o.a.rder, holding tight to every little sc.r.a.p and shred. Now she decided to spend it on Obama, a fellow Chicagoan whom she knew well. Entertainers, like politicians, succeed wildly when they can see or feel where the culture is headed before anyone else. That doesn't mean that Hollywood is an unerring guide to where the country is headed. But Winfrey had already accomplished the improbable feat that Obama would have to pull off, which was to convince white Americans that she understood their lives and had their interests and well-being not just in her mind but in her heart. It might have been a long shot for an African American to win America's position of highest trust, but she knew it wasn't impossible. has estimated at more than $2 billion, presides over a vast entertainment and lifestyle empire whose centerpiece had long been her eponymous syndicated talk show, watched by betwee