Yes, You Can

Last night Sandy and I went with some of our kids and kids in law to the big Obama rally in Austin. In the picture you can see Sam, me, Sandy, Rolf, Kristy. (Julia is taking the picture.)

To be fair, here is a picture of Sam and Julia in front of a huge Texas flag that flanked the stage.

We went early to get a decent place to stand and ended up about 40 feet from him when he spoke. This is a view of him from where we were standing. You can see the top of my rather curly head in the lower front.

It was an amazing speech, which I may have more to say about later. He is certainly long on both inspiring rhetoric and policy specifics. Almost an hour went by while he spoke and I scarcely noticed.

I will admit I really hope he becomes president. What intrigued me most, though, was what he has already done just by being who he is. We were flanked on one side by an middle aged working class African American man and his son, and on the other by a young African American couple. Both young men were hard for Obama to win over. They both looked pretty hardened by life. Neither of them ever started cheering the way one's father and the other's girl friend did. But it was interesting to watch Obama slowly break through and get them to smile a bit and clap a few times for things like getting out of Iraq.

Almost nine years ago I started doing interviews in schools and community centers of the formerly segregated African American area of East Austin. I was interested in the digital divide, what was keeping African Americans and Latinos away from the Internet in very disproportionate numbers. One of the Latino boys I interviewed in a focus group literally referred to computers as "women's work." Which was stunning at the time, given how most people then thought the technology biased toward men. I came to understand that few of the boys I talked to knew any adult man (particularly in their ethnic group and social class) who had the kind of job that used a computer (which already included almost all professional level jobs by 2000).

I began to realize that most effective thing I could have done about the digital divide was introduce these kids to adult men that they could identify with, who used computers, had been to college, and had professional level jobs that required computer use. I worked with one tall, athletic looking African American man named Leroy on one of those projects. His presence was magic in opening kids up to seeing the computers as something that guys like them could use. If we could have cloned Leroy to work in all the schools in East Austin, we would really have opened up a lot of eyes, and a lot of hopes, much faster.

I read a similar example from a story about Michelle Obama in the February 25 Newsweek, "of a 10-year-old girl she met in a beauty parlor in South Carolina who told her that if Barak wins the White House, 'it means I can imagine anything for myself''."

So in many ways, I am ecstatic that Obama has gotten this far, presenting the example, or role model, he does. But it sure would be nice, if those same kids got to see an African American man be president of the USA.