A Day Late and a Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama's "Post-Racial" America

A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama's "Post-Racial" America (Wiley;  January 2010; $25.95; Cloth; ISBN:  978-0-470-52066-6) Washington Post editor Robert E. Pierre and former This American Life producer Jon Jeter set out to collect the stories of African-Americans from all walks of life, gauging the effect Barack Obama has had on their lives.  For example, take Daisy Mae, who grew up on a sugarcane plantation and turned 79 just after Election Day.  The contours of her life have been deeply shaped by growing up black in the American South, and she never thought she’d see the day her country would elect a black man as president. That next afternoon, like so many other Americans, she wanted to save her local Louisiana newspaper to mark the occasion. There was no picture of Barack Obama, and only a veiled mention that he’d been elected as the nation’s 43^rd president.   

For many of the people in this book—an entrepreneur, a soldier, a union leader, a hip-hop activist—after years of getting short-changed, it’s no surprise that the changes that have come haven’t come soon enough or large enough.    

The election of Barack Obama was both a symbolic landmark for Black America, and a goal many had worked for in the hopes that he would see the world their way.  A year in, the shining symbol is still there, but has having a black president made a difference in the lives African American citizens?

A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT takes a closer look at the role Obama’s victory comes to play in the personal role the lives of the men and women they’ve profiled, chronicling the more nuanced reality that set in once the ticker tape was swept up and the reporters went home. 

Pierre and Jeter’s reporting suggests there’s little reality behind the claims of many that we’ve become a “post-racial” country, and that the election proves race is no longer worth talking about. Pierre and Jeter’s stories delve into the complex issues we will have to deal with going forward:

• The ongoing challenges young African-American men face
• A culture of subtle, but persistent, racism
• The stagnation of blacks vis à vis whites
• The paradox of widespread African-American participation in the military despite widespread anti-war sentiment
• The decline of unions even as organized labor becomes the primary vehicle for black progress
• The challenges faced by interracial families
• The lack of good schools or healthcare for the poor
• The inability of well-off African-Americans to lift up others