By Lee A. Daniels

A black American of mixed racial parentage, with still considerable personal popularity in America and abroad, is President of the United States. The ideas, activities and fashions of his wife, America’s First Lady, are followed closely and admiringly here and abroad as well.

Nothing could provide a more dramatic illustration of American society’s inclusiveness, its openness to talent and ambition—and to black Americans’ determined drive over the last four decades to claim the full measure of their long-denied American citizenship.

But fourteen months into the Obama Presidency, it’s become more and more obvious that the spectacular example of the First Family sketches only a partial portrait of the present and possible future of Black America. The rest of the portrait—better to call it a mosaic—is far more complex and, in some areas, far less sunny.

Indeed, that grim clouds shadow Black America is evident with each new edition of the federal government’s monthly jobs report.

There for the last twenty-six months one has found in the document’s dry statistics and dispassionate prose the devastating reach of the worst recession the nation as a whole has endured since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

And there during this period one has also consistently found one statistic which underscores the frightening scope of black Americans’ predicament: the official black unemployment rate.

Since December 2007, when the downturn began, the official black unemployment rate has most often been at least 60 percent greater than that of whites. For example, last month, while whites endured an unemployment rate of 9.7 percent, blacks suffered through one of 15.8 percent.

Even worse, it’s now widely acknowledged that the official government rate significantly understates the true jobless rate by as much as five percentage points.

And, overwhelmingly, economists and other experts expect the fledgling economic recovery now taking hold to be one of relatively anemic job creation.

Thus, albeit the Obama ascendancy, the fundamental challenge facing black Americans for the last decade—a challenge rooted completely in the dynamics of race—has not changed. Bereft of any appreciable wealth and undermined by a continuing structural racism that under-educates vast numbers of black children, imprisons nearly a million black adults and in myriad ways significantly limits blacks’ access to the society’s upper reaches, black Americans as a group stand, still, on the edge of a precipice.

Unless the disparate elements of Black America, from its upper class to its poor, can find ways to substantially reduce the severe problems bedeviling it, Black America could become nothing more than an atomized collection of social groups, like islands in an archipelago, whose members feel they have less and less in common with one another. To prevent that, they must fight the dynamic of globalization that is leaching out of American society the very kind of jobs that would be most readily accessible to the least skilled and least educated blacks.

Solving this problem, which has been a drag on black progress since the 1960s, is enormously complicated – and the prospects for success are not high. But there is no choice but to try. This is Black America’s last chance.

Ironically, the threat to Black America’s future has become even greater during the last three years as Obama was rising to the presidency—a rise powered by the patient and sophisticated political gamesmanship the black electorate employed from Obama’s announcement of his candidacy to the general election.

Since Obama’s election, that predicament has become even more complicated by the eruption of a racist reaction among a segment of the white electorate. The racially-coded insults to and loopy conspiracy theories about the Obamas, and the proclamations of the need for a violent “revolution” against Washington, from right-wing politicians, conservative talk-show jockeys, and ordinary citizens recall the virulent, white-backlash response of the mid-1960s to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.

If the substantial polarization now apparent in national politics continues, it will be a formidable threat to the Obama administration—and to the coalition-building that Black America needs to do if it’s to have any chance of solving the serious problems afflicting it.

And yet, black Americans’ response to these and other markers of storm clouds has been optimism.

That response has been limned in a number of news stories since Obama’s election. Now, those informal findings have been recently confirmed by two polls—one from the Pew Research Center; the other from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

In January, Pew released the latest in its long series of surveys on race relations. Its title: Blacks Upbeat About Black Progress, Prospects: A Year After Obama’s Election. Pew said that assessment stemmed from an “upbeat set of blacks’ views on a range” of matters, including relations between blacks, whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans, local community satisfaction and expectations for future black progress. “In each of these realms,” the document stated, “the perceptions of blacks have changed for the better over the past two years, despite a deep recession and a jobless recovery that have hit blacks especially hard.”

Given this and other data in the poll, one might well wonder whether blacks are caught up in a Pollyannaish fever over the mere fact of Obama’s election.

Yet, their responses to other survey questions show that blacks see clearly the flaws of America—especially its persistent strain of significant racism—but that they have chosen, again, to pledge allegiance to the American Ideal.

Their willingness to do so underscores a fundamental dynamic of black Americans’ existence since Emancipation: the complexity of black progress. This is the sharp tension that has always accompanied the advancements blacks have forged in American society – because that progress has often been more than matched by a stagnation or a worsening of conditions for other sectors of Black America.

What happened to Black America during the last two decades offers a perfect example: Substantial progress in expanding the black middle class; and, finally, at the turn of the century, the benefits of the Long Boom reached all the way down the socio-economic ladder to the most downtrodden group of Americans—poor, young black males.

Their taking the lowest-wage jobs at the very bottom of the jobs ladder is what drove the black unemployment rate to historic lows under 8 percent. The progress made ended quickly, however, as the recession of 2001 erased virtually all of the economic gains blacks as a group had made in the previous decade.

Then, in 2006, the subprime mortgage crisis began to wreak an even fiercer havoc on blacks’ economic status, a predicament now compounded by the current recession.

The result is that the social and economic peril facing Black America—even as a black American occupies the Presidency—cannot be overstated.

Yet, despite the considerable set of statistics and other evidence that may provoke a very dire forecast, there are four substantial reasons for hope.

The first, and most basic, is that Barack Obama is President of the United States and, as of yet, the Democratic Party controls the levers of the federal government.

Second, consider the alternative. Where would the United States of America be now under a McCain-Palin administration? That was the best the Republican Party had to offer then; and what it has to offer now is a void being breached by an inchoate, hydra-headed reactionary movement.

Third, the coalition that elected Obama, despite defections among white independents, is still solid. And Obama now seems to understand that, in this era, governing effectively will require an almost constant mobilization of his supporters among the electorate to offset the obstructionist posture of Republican politicians and the conservatism of the Blue Dog democrats in Congress.

And finally, there is the black American electorate: The one that, ignored by the GOP, played the two-party game within the Democratic party for four decades with great skill and patience. The one that continued playing “smart politics” throughout the long political season of 2006 to 2008, ensuring that its two favorites, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, would battle each other for the Democratic presidential nomination in a way that would prove the primary winner’s fitness to contend for the Presidency itself.

(It is worth noting, for all the Clinton-haters, that the October 2008 poll of Black America by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that blacks favorable attitudes toward both Clintons had returned to their pre-2006 85-plus percent levels. In other words, blacks still considered the Clintons “family.”

The extraordinary mobilization of the black electorate, along with its 95-percent Democratic vote, was the bedrock of the Obama victory.

But it’s important to understand that development wasn’t solely the product of the Obama campaign’s expert work. Considered in hindsight, one could argue that black voters had been mobilizing themselves for just such a maximum effort since the Million Man March of 1995 and the vote controversies of the 2000 presidential election.

Earlier this month, a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies survey of black voters (PDF) in the four battleground states of Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina found that they continue to show a high degree of interest in the political activity in their state and that between 74 and 80 percent say they’re very likely to vote.

If that occurs, such a high level of mobilization would send a strong signal that black voters intend to remain on high alert and back their political investment – Obama and the Democratic Party – to the maximum degree.

That’s the only way they can give themselves, and Black America as a whole, the chance it needs to thrive in the future.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline