Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

they complained about the new job bank that we had announced with such fanfare the night of the rally, but that had turned out to be a bust. As Marty had planned it, a state university out in the suburbs had been assigned to run the program—it was a matter of efficiency, he explained, since the university had the computers already in place. Unfortunately, two months after it was supposed to have started, no one had found work through the program. The computers didn’t work right; the data entry was plagued with errors; people were sent to interview for jobs that didn’t exist. Marty was livid, and at least once a week he would have to drive out to the university, cursing under his breath as he tried to pry answers out of officials who seemed more concerned with next year’s funding cycle. But the women from Altgeld weren’t interested in Marty’s frustrations. All they knew was that $500,000 had gone somewhere, and it wasn’t in their neighborhood. For them, the job bank became yet more evidence that Marty had used them to push a secret agenda, that somehow whites in the suburbs were getting the jobs they’d been promised. “Marty’s just looking out for his own,” they grumbled.