Post Racial America? You Are Right!
After President Barack Obama's landmark victory in the Presidential election's last year, many pundits as well as ordinary Americans were eager to proclaim a new era in American history, "the post-racial era." Many blacks, most especially those who were civil right activists sounded a word of caution which many people failed to listen to. It does not take the election of one man to change the whole history of people who for centuries were told they are sub-human or at best less than equal. There is no doubt that we have made a lot of progress as a nation in electing the first African American president, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The recent event in which a Cambridge police officer arrested Henri Louis Gate, an African American professor reminds us that we have not reached a "post-racial" era yet. There is still a mutual suspicion that exists between both races. Most times, this is not conscious but there are plenty of incidents in which these cases are deliberate acts of racism.
It would be difficult to know what was going on in the minds of both the police officer and Professor Gate. It is possible that the police officer did not deliberately take into consideration race when he was dealing with professor Gate. That does not mean that race was not unconsciously a factor. I have many good friends who are White and believe that there is no atom of racism in their body and yet sometimes will do or say certain things that I feel uncomfortable with and consider to be racist. Do I fault them for it? No. We are all products of different histories. In our every day encounters, there is a conscious or unconscious "clash of histories." Our individual histories is the prism through which we assess events that happen daily in our lives. Unfortunately for many black people, that history is shaped by many years of oppression and racial profiling. It is very easy to find a black person who has had negative experiences with the police. I still have nightmares from an incident in which two years ago a police officer pulled a gun on me, only to write me a warning ticket for my car's left side brake light that was dead. As I shared my story that day with others, everyone told me I fit their "profile": a tall black man, driving a black Mercedes Benz with tinted windows. It is possible that the police officer that stopped me did not "consciously" consider race but my history predisposed me to believe this action was racially motivated. The question is, could he have pulled a gun on a properly dressed tall white black man? I will never know the answer to that question.
We still have a long way to go in healing the divisions that exists between us and in "perfecting our union." It would be stupid to delude ourselves that we are in a post-racial America. We need more education in race relations. The most some people know of Martin Luther King Jr. is that it is a public holiday. When Coretta Scott King died, a classmate in graduate school had no idea who she was. We will be in a post-racial America when we have all got it into our heads and sincerely believe those words in our declaration of independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Follow Rev. Bekeh Utietiang on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bekeh
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The fastest way to heal racial inequalities...prosecute the guilty!
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the blacks (redacted:insertion=my poetic license),
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a White.
Then they came for the Whites (my insertion),
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
As a white women with a large extended family, many of whom are black, I wonder if there are many black adults who have not felt some degree of unease when dealing with an authority figure who is white. It's human to have a knee-jerk reaction when you feel threatened, particularly in your own home, and if I were Gates I probably would have reacted in the same way. As the Rev. said, clash of histories. Crowley, whom I understand has been teaching diversity training for 5 years and presumably had some himself, should have been more sensitive to Gates' position.
As both Gates and Obama said, it's a teaching (and learning) moment. 100s of years of the pain and stain of slavery take a long time to absorb, truly understand, and eliminate - certainly more than 8 years of a presidency. But it's a beginning, and continuing the dialogue is important.
You mean 10s of thousands of years of slavery. Remember there was slavery in Africa long before Asians, Whites or Arabs went there.
An angry white man? Not everything you read on the internet is true.
This is probably trite, but I view the impact of Brown v Board of Education only just now taking a hold in our society, which had greater impact than Executive Order 9981 integrating the military. My wife and I both went to racially integrated schools, but in talking to our parents (my mother in particular), did not have any minorities in their classes growing up. Anecdotally, I'm reminded of an NPR correspondent, whose name I forget now, but was telling the personal story in a round table, that he allowed his kids to stay up late to watch Obama's acceptance speech for the DNC. He described how he personally felt hope and inspiration that this was the first step in a post-racial society, but his young kids couldn't understand why it was a big deal.
I feel that my relatively young generation, the 30s and early 40s, are the first to truly be exposed to integration from a young age up and (hopefully) don't have as many biases as older generations. I personally feel very good that my young daughter's memories of her first President will be that of a black man, not another in a long line of "old white dudes."
I went to a racially integrated school as well. We (the wh ites) got beat up quite regularly. Thanks Baby Boomers!
I whole heartedly agree, as a middle aged white woman.
Race relations has not gotten better like we thought, it's worse than we thought.
We must fight it every day and stamp it out as best we can. Now is not the time to be silent.
Stand up for what's right and stand up for our good President!
The haters are hijacking the conversation, we must drive the conversation.
How can relations get better when we can't have open and honest discussions, as the Atty General asked for (the one that called us a nation of cowards). Ask James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA how that open and honest thing is working out for him
Say what you mean.
Perhaps the election of the first black president isn't so much a change as a milestone. Maybe it doesn't tell us where we're going as much as how far we've come. But there's still a long way to go.
I would say part of that long way to go is understanding that not everything a white police officer does in a situation with an African American is motivated by race. Maybe Gates should not have assumed Crowley was a bigot...
Sergeant Crowley was an instructor at the Lowell Police Academy for five years, teaching a class on racial profiling and how officers can deal with certain situations, according to the Associated Press.
Before joining the Cambridge force, Sergeant Crowley was in the national spotlight as a Brandeis University police officer. He was on duty on July 27, 1993 when the Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis suffered a massive heart attack during a private workout on campus. Sergeant Crowley, who knew of the player’s previous collapse during an April playoff game, tried to resuscitate Mr. Lewis, who was black, by administering CPR, but was unsuccessful.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/us/24cambridge.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
Of course there is a long way to go ... because that is how the race $racket$ works.
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