Never will I forget that winter night in January of 2008. I was relaxing in Forsyth County, Georgia, where I was living at the time, watching a youngish Black senator from Illinois deliver a blazing victory speech after winning Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucus. Barack Obama was on his way to becoming the first Black president, on a campaign message of hope and change. I was in Forsyth to observe a different set of American hopes—to do anthropological ethnography, or what some people call immersive journalism, or what others call just “deep hanging out,” for a book that I was writing on whiteness in America.