Let’s say, just hypothetically, of course, that a group of people recognizes something about itself that is really wrong. I mean, slap-yourself-on-the-forehead, can’t-believe-we-were-actually-that-stupid wrong. Okay. Recognizing the issue is the first step to correcting the issue. Now let’s say that this group of people makes positive strides, along with, to be honest, a few sizable mistakes even though motivations were good, and achieves progress. Let’s say that this group of people sees very pronounced moments of progress over the past few years, and understandably wants to keep putting them out there as proof that full resolution of the issue is being worked toward. Let’s say every now and then an incident occurs that receives substantial media attention. Then every body’s upset again, the whole thing is thrown into a disastrous spiral, and that group of people ends up thinking that they’ve actually made little progress at all, have a long way to go, and starts feeling as though its all hopeless and that there will always be ignorant bigots around.
Oops…I gave it away with that last sentence, didn’t I?
You see, the issue at hand with this (not-so) hypothetical group of people is that they kept the issue always near the surface. They never moved on. They never let it be. They talked about a solution, and attempted to enact a solution, but they never let the problem dip below the surface long enough to permit the solution to take effect. Hard to blame them, in a way…after all, the problem was, in fact, a horrendous one that led to the poor lifestyle and even deaths of many. Wars were fought. Battles were waged, families divided, tears shed. Difficult to let that die, after all. Except that, to not do so kept breathing life into the problem, perhaps just at the points where it might have been dead. Part of the reason for this was fear: to accidentally say anything that could in any way be construed as contributing to the problem was absolutely intolerable, because of the offense it could cause. In this (not-so) hypothetical society, after all, offense was quite possibly the worst thing that could happen next to death, and absolutely everyone had at least one thing that they were just walking through life daring everyone to offend them over.
Then, when a notable slip-up occurred, instead of treating it coherently and respectfully and working to find a solution, the leader of this group of people becomes flustered and says something…well, something that could have had better-chosen words, and something that, again, wouldn’t let the problem die, but perpetuated it into something even more severe.
Well…I guess I really gave it away with that one, right?
While our President apologized today for not choosing his words carefully and contributing to the problem that exploded into our national media when Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested after he apparently raised his voice to a police officer that was called to Gates’ home because of a possible break-in complaint, the point is that the situation was exacerbated, and continues to be, far beyond its actual importance. A mistake likely occurred on the parts of everyone involved, both Gates and the decorated officer who initiated the arrest. Perhaps, though, if the problem were just not empowered as much as it has been, then we wouldn’t have had such angst resulting from it.
I say empowered because we, all of us, continue to give racism more power than it should actually have. We keep it at the forefront, always tip-toeing around it, always bringing it back with reporting like the second Times piece above uses (this “tests” our faith in “racial progress”?), in which the same reporter constantly qualifies and references individuals quoted with phrases such as “who is black,” and then off-handedly mentions the point of view of one prominent source who describes raising his children as “post-racial,” to not see skin color.
Ironic, because that is the crux of the issue. We need to be, and should always have been, “post-racial,” since we once fell short of the ideal status of “non-racial.” I was raised by parents who treated everyone the same, regardless of ethnic origin or skin color. They rarely mentioned these as even identifiers when discussing an individual. I have friends and colleagues of many ethnic origins and skin colors. I see them as people, as individuals. I don’t think of their color or ethnic background when I think of them, except to be aware of how it positively impacts their personality. Perhaps if we all did this, and then raised the following generation without the knowledge of racism as anything other than an historical event…that is to say, if we declared it “dead” and left it that way….then it would be, because we would no longer empower it. To do this, however, a larger cultural issue would need to be addressed, that of our fear of offense. Every time we’re offended, the thing by which we have been offended becomes more powerful than it would otherwise have been.
What if we were created without a concept of race, but just diverse in really artistic ways? That would mean that we have thrust this concept on ourselves, crippling ourselves by intolerance of physiology which is different. To take that perspective would mean celebrating the differences that come with different cultures and ethnic heritages, while not even considering what has been misappropriated in the past. Let it stay in the past. A horrible mistake is a horrible mistake, and certainly racism falls into that category. However, it continues to thrive when we resurrect it every day, and begin to thrust errors into the spotlight in concern of some hypothetical apocalyptic connotation that they supposedly hold for our culture.
Knowledge of history must be maintained, lest it repeat itself. There is a balance to be struck, however, in maintaining that history in such a way that we do not repeat it in our zeal to overcome the problem.