If the people will lead …
The United States has its first black president, in Barack Obama. Yet for all the progress Obama’s election represents in racial terms, the great political challenge for blacks in America remains intact, according to a panel of scholars who spoke at MIT on Thursday: finding a way to implement policies that provide new opportunities for a larger portion of African-Americans.“It’s key for African-Americans and other marginalized groups not to think that you just vote, go home and wait for good things to happen,” said J. Phillip Thompson, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. That problem applies to all levels of government, and to city-level politics in particular, Thompson added, saying, “work has to be done to figure out what to do with the office, with the resources that are there. … We have not tackled that. We have continued to elect mayors with absolutely no...