If It Ain’t Broke, I Can’t Fix It

Recently, I was tweeted that I was really the racist for suggesting in my tweets that racism is a problem in American politics.  Considering the source of the tweets, I forwent a reply.  To paraphrase Robert Kiyosaki, ‘Arguing with an idiot, makes two idiots’.  However, these tweets rekindled my desire to understand how a society so couched in racism, fails to realize it. 

Following the great black migration to the north in the 1950s, it used to be said by some blacks, having encountered the cloaked racism in the north, that at least in the south white people were “up front” with their racism.  Some thought, that lacking the KKK, voter intimidations, Jim Crow laws, beatings and lynching of black men, this was a benign racism compared to the racism they had experienced in the south.   They could achieved some measure of security for themselves and their families in moving north, but they soon became aware that the racism would impact their longer term struggle for economic dignity, and if they strayed out of their designated parts of the city, their very lives.

As compared to the overt racism of the South in the 50’s, the relative safety of the North’s more covert racism was a welcomed change.  What the new arrivals soon discovered that racism in the north was so covert, most northern whites didn’t think it even existed, making it even more difficult to fight.  In the South you knew who your enemy was, and they reminded you daily that you were definitely theirs’.  In the North, while that determination was no less easy for blacks, their white counterparts were clueless as to how they could possibly be considered racist, even if blacks had to stay out of their neighborhoods for fear of their very lives.

Over 50 years later, I think back to November 2008.  While I never uttered the phase “post-racial America”, I’m afraid I might have been naïve to think that America had turned a corner on race.  What I learned since is it wasn’t a corner we turned; it was a “U-turn” instead. They are still clueless.  You can’t fix something that you don’t even think is broke.

The election of the first black President of the United States should have announced to the world that America was moving beyond race.  It should have been a source of great pride, that a descendant of slaves could, a century and a half later, be President.  What America has said instead to the world and America, how dare a black man presume to even think he should, or even could hold the highest office in America.