As the first black man to be elected President of the United States of America is about to take the oath of office, some argue that we have now achieved The Dream.  Yet the same day that Barack Obama swears to God to uphold the Constitution, police officers will hassle, and ultimately beat down, some young black man wearing saggy pants.  Some store anti-theft security agent will follow a couple of teenage black women through the store to make sure they don’t steal.  And white lawyers, like me, will continue to note the skin color of clients.

I can’t adequately explain how these two worlds can co-exist, but I know that they do.  I believe that things have improved, though slowly and often as a result of accomplishments that are collateral to race.  Aside from his slightly darker skin color, Barack Obama could have been any well-educated, successful, boomer yuppie.  Whites saw more in common than different.  But this does little to aid the blacks who never made it out of their traditional ghettos.  Without the education, family support and great expectations, their status remains little different than it did in 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was enacted.

The saddest commentary is that criminal defense lawyers remains in a position bridging the gap between one segment of black society and the mainstream.  It’s sad because of what we do, and why it connects with so many black people.  They are still the disproportionate focus of our criminal justice system. 

Some argue that the reason for this is “simple”.  It’s because they commit a disproportionate amount of crime,  Whether that claim is true, since it ignores the reality that they are under disproportionate police scrutiny, is immaterial.  Put a young man of any color into a good school, with a strong family, with expectations of achieving success by hard work and following societal norms, and he will succeed.  Leave him the ghetto with farcical education, drugs, broken families and the expectation of death by 27, and he will meet those expectations as well.  And as long as our police spend their energies enforcing laws with much greater vigor in certain neighborhoods than others, we will have prisons filled disproportionately with young black men.

But not every black kid from the ghetto becomes a criminal, the deniers retort.  True, but neither would all the nice, warm, happy white kids in suburbia end up in law school if they lived under those conditions.  Indeed, they don’t now. Can you imagine how bad they would be if they lost all their advantages.

Whites are tired of black rage and black excuses, as if they get to choose how someone else is should feel about their lives.  Of course, they don’t live the life of a person with black skin, and merely project their own glaring misunderstanding of life as a black person on others.  Some of us try to understand, but we still go home as a white person at the end of the day.  The best we can hope to do is admit our prejudice and try our best to control it.

Now that Barack Hussein Obama will assume the highest office in America, will that end the drought of expectation for other blacks?  I can’t begin to know.  I would guess that it brings faith to the ever-increasing black middle and upper class.  Yes, they exist.  They are as educated, well-off, kind and knowledgeable as anyone else.  But it’s still not a hop, skip and jump for those who remain behind in the ghetto.  They may feel proud of Obama’s election, but it’s unlikely to have much to do with their lives.

Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to make his point before his life was cut short by the hatred born of white ignorance.  There has been progress.  There is still a long way to go.  That we have elected a black man president is an important step in the process, but it’s only a step.  There is so much more to go.  Why it has taken so long is a testament to the depth of the problem, and the size of the mountain Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to climb.

Update:  This week’s Blawg Review is hosted at On Being a Black Lawyer, rather than A Public Defender as had been the traditional locus of the Martin Luther King Day Blawg Review.  Sadly, no post by Gideon can be found in this blawg review, though some of the usual suspects are in there.