Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) by Daniel Friedman Page B

Obama’s children.”
    “Abramsky davened with Brian at his bar mitzvah, and you hated Abramsky.”
    “Not the same thing.”
    “It’s almost exactly the same thing.”
    “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
    “You’d probably like his white grandmother,” Rose said.
    “John McCain is a war hero.”
    “William says McCain isn’t up to the task of fixing the economy.”
    “The country never would have got into this mess in the first place, if only somebody had consulted William.”
    “William says McCain would make Phil Gramm Secretary of the Treasury.”
    “Is that a bad thing?”
    “William seems to think it would be.”
    “I liked things better when Brian was still with us, and William never remembered to call.”
    “I also liked things better when Brian was still with us.”
    “Yeah.”
    On television, my grandson’s president was starting to get more emphatic, punctuating his sentences with aggressive gestures: “Legalized discrimination—where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments—meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.”
    Rose was sobbing now, softly into her sleeve.
    “Is this bothering you? We don’t have to watch it. We can see what’s on the animal channel.”
    “No, it’s not this. It’s just…”
    “For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it,” Obama said. “Those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations—those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race and racism continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.”
    “I understand,” I said. I stubbed the cigarette into the ashtray and set the notebook down so I could light another. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
    “It’s good to talk about it,” Rose said. “I mean, it hurts, but I think it’s good.”
    “Wounds don’t heal over if you pick at them all the time.”
    Obama was reaching a crescendo: “In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”
    “I think I like him,” Rose said.
    “I don’t trust him. He doesn’t look like a president to me.”
    “Neither does Hillary, I bet.”
    “What kind of name is that, anyway? Barack?”
    “Baruch.”
    “What?”
    “You said ‘Barack’ and I said ‘Baruch.’”
    “Yeah, I heard you. What do you want?”
    “Never mind.”
    I tapped my cigarette against the side of the ashtray. “Oh, I get it now.”
    “Barack. Baruch. Barack. Baruch.” She laughed.
    “Just because you’re right doesn’t mean that you’re right,”