Mar 26 2009
“Post-racial”? Not so fast!
The ascent of President Barack Obama apparently ensured that a candid assessment of American race relations would remain as timely as it is unlikely. Just three-and-a-half months after the election - in the middle of Black History Month - Attorney General Eric Holder was vilified for stating the obvious, calling ours “a nation of cowards,” afraid to confront what’s universally understood to be its “Race Problem.”
Historically, it’s been the most intractable, and is quickly exposed when manifest in terms of “White” and “Black.” Although our strange amalgam of various races also includes “Brown” and “Yellow” - as well as the geographic primacy of “Red” by calling the actual people Native Americans - nothing says USA like the strained relations between its citizens of European ancestry and those of African descent.
Pick any two of these colors. Place them together and soon, perhaps immediately, you’ll observe animosity. To make the exercise even more dramatic, put them all together. Using the Christopher Columbus starter kit, descendants of those aboard the Mayflower unwittingly did just that. Their American experiment created today’s dysfunctional national family, wherein colors are less euphemisms for skin pigment and more the sides of an ancient argument that intensified nearly six centuries ago.
The notion that last year’s presidential election mitigated that argument is delusional.
