In Transition

Barack Obama is sure to face enormous expectations from African-Americans when he takes office, but he’s already signalling how he intends to handle those expectations. If he stays focused on common concerns, he says, the specific needs of the African-American community will be well covered.

In an interview with Ebony magazine, scheduled to hit the newsstands next week, Obama said he doesn’t see much difficulty in addressing African-Americans’ concerns because they tend to be “issues that affect everybody” — even if the impact on the African-American community is more severe.

So by pursuing his proposal to expand health coverage, creating jobs and taking action to limit people’s 401(k) losses, he said, he can tackle problems that disproportionately affect African-Americans but also are causing anxiety throughout the entire country. There will be cases where Obama said he’ll look at more specific problems — such as racial disparities in the quality of health care and discrimination in the criminal justice system — but those will be the exception, rather than the rule.

“I don’t want to have to choose between different groups. I want to put together a plan that is good for everybody,” Obama told the magazine. “When we spend all our time just focusing on things that are unique to us, it becomes harder for us to build the broad coalitions to deal with the problems that we have in common with everybody.”

— David Nather