ABSTRACT
Symbols operate within limited worlds. Physically, a political leader can shake hands with every person in an audience. Yet any one issue will arouse quite different responses in different sections of the hall. Encased in their sense of reality, people in the same room live in different symbolic worlds. Within America, as well as in the world at large, there are separate symbolic worlds. But in different ethnic cultures, experiences with persons of other races vary quite widely, and traditions of racial antagonism arise around significantly different symbols. For a person who would become the symbolic representative of all the people, accepted as the leader by all, the political challenge is to find the openings through which to penetrate every symbolic world, while respecting the unique contours of each. A difficult task, for the symbolic worlds of others do not parallel one's own, are baffling, tangential, remote, angular. Explorers who have succeeded carry the secrets unarticulated with them.
