The buzzword of the moment is “post-racial.” We’re supposed to be living in “post-racial times.”
This is apparently evidenced by Sen. Obama’s viability as a presidential candidate and the prospect of the nation’s first black president.
Until recently, pundits and analysts were rather smug about our supposed collective transcendence of race. Here we are, after all, in the enlightened year of 2008, with frontrunners for the Democratic nomination who are both female and black.
But then came the controversial sermons of Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright, into the spotlight—and the tune changed.
It swiftly became clear that Rev. Wright did not conceive of a “post-racial” world—he called America that “U.S. of KKK-A,” and even suggested that America invented the AIDS virus to kill people of color.
And Barack Obama—the biracial candidate, the standard-bearer of “change” in a post-racial world, found himself in the peculiar position of having to distance himself from Wright’s more inflammatory comments while simultaneously acknowledging and contextualizing the underlying frustration and resentment that preceded the pastor’s remarks.
Not an easy task.
He did, I thought, a very good job of characterizing what he called the “racial divide”—the residual anger of black Americans—“a view that sees white racism as endemic”—and the resentment of white Americans toward such topics as affirmative action and “reverse racism.”
Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the cesspool of political discourse that is the Internet knows perfectly well that these racial tensions are boiling under the surface. Just because it’s become socially unacceptable to discuss the racial underpinnings of the Jena Six case or the current presidential race doesn’t mean the underlying misunderstandings have gone away.
We haven’t yet transcended race, we’ve just gotten better at publicly pretending to ignore it.
It’s also important to remember that the civil rights movement in this country happened very recently. America’s troubled racial history can’t yet be relegated to the realms of history books.
My son has a living paternal great-great-grandmother in her nineties who grew up in the Deep South. She is old enough to have known former slaves, to remember Jim Crow laws and systematic state-sponsored racism.
And when I traveled to New York to introduce my infant son to my late grandmother, she was extremely surprised. The first thing she said was, “Is his father a Negro?”
Theirs was a markedly different generation.
Our generation shares few of those racial hang-ups. We are too young to remember the civil rights movement, and we live in an increasingly diverse world. But we still inherit the residual racial resentments of our predecessors.
I would like to think that the root of most racial conflicts isn’t blind hatred, but rather a fundamental inability to see the world from the perspective of another—to understand why people of different races perceive the world differently.
Until Americans of all races achieve mastery over the ability to walk a mile in someone else’s skin, let’s retire the word “post-racial” and work toward being “post-hatred,” instead.
Reach Ruth DeFoster at RMDefost2404@winona.edu