Rejecting Racism: Stop Running The Fat Cat’s Rat Race
Today’s speech on race by Senator Barack Obama was noteworthy. The media is abuzz with glowing proclamations. Some have said that the Obama speech was the most important speech on race in the forty years since the death of Martin Luther King.
While pondering the many positive observations, what struck me most was the fact that forty years have passed…but not the racial divide…regardless of the words Dr. King spoke then and despite the words Senator Obama uttered today. That left me wondering what was to be gained by stating the obvious to those who have never been intended to appreciate it or to those who aren’t interested in changing it.
Let me attempt an explanation by first asking a question. What is the concept of race? Is it really anything more than a human construct that allows us to identify and isolate others in a classic “we versus they” dynamic? The answer to my question is no. In so noting, the issue of race is a human invention used to either elevate one group or to denigrate another group. It is the means by which many of us can avoid our unique human ability…and the responsibility it brings…to employ informed observations and reasoned judgments.
Our capacity to discern color or country of origin has often been the justification for the wholesale condemnations that frequently precede the waging of wars. It serves as the mechanism by which we dehumanize our enemies and excuse our transgressions. Race has become the means by which we have circumvented our obligation to judge others by what lies within. Instead, it allows us to slay others for that which sits upon the surface.
Today, many of the pundits have argued that we avoid discussions of race because it is a difficult topic. I reject much of that argument. I contend we don’t address racism because its elimination requires us to grant our fellow humans a degree of fairness we aren’t willing to afford. In this world of limited resources, the concept of equality is apt to be perceived as the brake being applied to the unencumbered pursuit of more than one’s share of the spoils.
When pundits speak of forty years of seeming silence, they are simply exposing the swamp wherein still lurks a willingness to inflict more of the same on those who can be easily identified as different. What the passage of time has brought is the goal to do so through subtler methods and without speaking words that could subsequently serve as the evidence that we may still reject equal opportunity and equitable justice. All too often, it is far easier to assert that one’s child didn’t get into the school of his or her choice as a result of affirmative action than it is to admit our lengthy history of denying equal opportunities to the underprivileged. Perhaps we also seek to avoid an admission that the goal remains the same?
What most Americans don’t realize is that the powers that be have little interest in establishing an equitable order. This includes measures like the Bush tax cuts; but there is a better example that also allows me to focus on race. Simply look at the refusal of our government to enforce our existing immigration laws for the last two decades and you will begin to understand how the efforts to amass wealth have been transformed in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. The current clamor to close our border isn’t a sudden admission of exploitation; it is a recognition that the unchecked increase in the number of Mexicans has the potential to skew the political power such that those who have more may not be able to maintain their unchallenged hold on the power that assures more.
Look, the greed of those who govern hasn’t suddenly subsided. They have simply recognized that in their rush to expand their enrichment, they may have forgotten to police the portal. Hence we now have the calls for a temporary guest worker program…the modern means by which the underclass can be employed without enslavement…and prevented from circumventing the all-important political status quo.
At the same time, the powers that be prefer that this easily identifiable underclass be pitted against those Americans who are known as the “have-nots”. The approach isn’t unfamiliar. When the slaves were freed, they were quickly portrayed and perceived as an economic threat to southerners struggling to make ends meet. The same strategy has been embraced with Mexican immigrants.
Both efforts have been relatively successful because the battle for fewer dollars was intensified by an increase in those competing to obtain them. Thus the animosities of austere Americans have been artfully aimed at those who are different (black or brown)…and not at those who look the same but hoard the lion’s share of the wealth.
In the end, race is the rail upon which the wizards of wealth have sought to separate one segment of society from another. When they succeed, they incite the insolence they intend.
Barack Obama deserves recognition for revisiting our racial rancor. However, unless and until each individual looks beyond the veil of vitriol that has been designed to divide us, we will forever overlook the power of the present to unite us. We’re engaged in the kind of race that can only be won when everyone refuses to participate. Our humanity needn’t be a hologram on the horizon. Healing must be achieved in the here and now.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Nothing. The reason he had to address it was for those people in the rather wide middle who ARE interested in changing things but who were troubled by Obama’s 20 year, intimate relationship with an extremist, racialist, hateful pastor. They were troubled by this relationship for the same reason that lefties were up in harms when McCain received the support of Rev. Hagee — even though McCain’s relationship with Hagee was roughly zero: he’d never gone to Hagee’s Church, let alone belonged to it for 20 years. Both Hagee and Wright hold extremist views that even Obama admits are bad. Those 20 years of regular Church attendance and making Wright a close adviser even to his campaign tied Wright’s extremist, racialist politics/theology to a candidate running as a uniter and a purveyor of hope. Obama cannot possibly win the national election without the strong support of the center in this country. So the speech wasn’t given to those who have never been intended to appreciate it or to those who aren’t interested in changing it. It was delivered to those who are interested, would like to see it changed but were troubled by Obama’s bone-headed, self-chosen, long-term connections to such a person as Rev. Wright.
Wow! Talk about a conclusory, circular, ‘let’s just assert the answer to the question without even the most cursory facts or reasoning’ statement! You don’t think that maybe, MAYBE, what scientists have described as millions of years of evolution MIGHT have something to do with our universal human distrust of the “other”? Not even enough to mention the possibility to then deconstruct it? Amazing.
I’d say that the ability to identify race and color of skin is as deeply ingrained as our ability to recognize faces of our own nearly instantaneously: it had to do with survival. Our own meant safety, security from threats from the outside, from the other. The ability to identify the other meant: stand and fight or turn and run for one’s life. What you’ve identified and flipped off without a single thought to other possible answers is actually so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that it probably will never be completely overcome. You don’t overcome millions of years of evolution in a single speech and it can’t be dismissed as nothing more than a social construct, in my opinion. As such, you’re going to have a much more difficult time throwing it off. That also would be an alternate explanation to the fact that race is still an issue in spite of 40 years since MLK, Jr.’s death.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Me,
If Obama’s speech was given to shore up his electability with the middle, I suspect it had far too much nuance for many in that constituency…especially if your evolutionary “distrust” theory holds water. After all, he refused to reject the “other” you identified as the “extremist, racialist, hateful pastor”.
Yes, let’s talk about circles. On the one hand you justify racism as an innate construct resulting from a survival of the fittest…kill or be killed perspective. Then you proceed to assail Senator Obams’a affiliation with a preacher who can easily be viewed to be exhibiting the very phenomenon you just excused.
Pardon my snark, but how can you use caveman logic to defend your own “mistrust” and then employ present day political parsing to explain why Senator Obama owes those in the middle an explanation of his own caveman behavior. If evolution explains away your mistrust of the “other”, why doesn’t it do the same for Senator Obama?
Or are you telling me that Obama ended up in a black church by accident because he hadn’t taken the time to see the color of his skin? You see, I think you, like many others, wanted Obama to offer an apology while still allowing you to reserve your “evolutionary” right to “mistrust” him and the rest of the “others” he affiliates with. Call it what you want but don’t sell it to me as some scientific justification for racism.
Further, how does your evolutionary theory explain the fact that we built ships to take us to Africa so we could capture the “others”…who, by the way, posed no threat to us…and bring them back to America to make them our slaves and conclude they were lesser humans? Where was the “evolutionary” response to a threat in that behavior? I love when civilized, educated humans suddenly explain away their actions as uncontrollable instinct. I guess we’re only continuing to evolve when it serves our purposes; otherwise we’re victims of our forever stained evolutionary past? Where’s my club…I’m feeling threatened?
And we haven’t even considered religion…you know that concept that says God gave us humans the unique capacity to think and reason. Now I don’t know how creationists would reconcile your argument, but it seems to me that your use of evolutionary limitations doesn’t comport all that well. Or are you saying sin isn’t a function of free will? If it isn’t, then those ten commandments seem like a rather tall order from a spiteful God who knows full well we were designed with innate evolutionary flaws that would preclude us from following his commands.
Let’s take it a step further. So God built us to recognize the different colors of other humans as a threat while he chose to leave that trait out of dogs and cats? Or was that evolutionary flaw only found in the human race as a matter of chance? Last time I checked, white dogs didn’t attack black dogs because their color told them to mistrust them as the “others”. So sad for us poor helpless humans, isn’t it? What with all of our intelligence, we had the misfortune to be wired with an irrational fear of our own…simply based upon coloration. Woe is me. If only we were like dogs and cats.
I have one last question. You state that many were “troubled by Obama’s bone-headed, self-chosen, long-term connections to such a person as Rev. Wright.” Would this bone-headed behavior possibly be a consequence of evolution? If so, I guess I’ll have to excuse your tortured circular argument. If not, when will you be making your conciliatory speech?
Regards,
Daniel
March 19th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Daniel,
I have nowhere defended racism. I presented an alternate point of origin for racism. But after spending a lot of words, that no one will ever see but me, I have argued myself into what is, essentially, your position: that racism is a social construct. So I might as well give my conciliatory speech right now.
However, I remain convinced that there is, in human nature, an evolutionary component to racism. Here’s where I came to after a lengthy argument with myself:
It boils down to, essentially, racism is a particularly toxic form of what evolutionary “fear of the other” can turn to when one of the races sufficiently advances technologically to the point that they no longer need fear the other. This was what allowed whites to, without fear, take blacks from Africa and elsewhere to make them slaves. It was, essencially, “fear of the other” without the fear, the sense of otherness remaining. But that fear remained in the background and arose again, particularly, at the election of Abraham Lincoln, whom many southerners feared would not only free the slaves but make them full citizens as well. Since blacks outnumbered whites in many places in the south, the fear included that blacks in equal or superior numbers, using western technologies of death, would avenge themselves upon their former owners.
But where I now disagree with my former self is in the idea that I think I vaguely had but now reject, that racism was the inevitable result of the fear of the other. While I think evolution DID transform into racism from an evolutionary “fear of the other”, it doesn’t necessarily do so.
It comes from telling ourselves and our offspring that the “otherness” of others equals inferiority to ourselves.
Craig R. Harmon
March 19th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I do, however, remain convinced that that fear of the other is an evolutionary hang-over that we, as human beings, will not so easily be rid of. For this reason, I believe that racism will be very difficult to deconstruct socially and racism will always be a possible (likely even) distortion of that evolutionary fear.
Once again, I agree with you, Daniel, that racism IS a social construct. I’m just sorry it took such a long argument with myself to come to that point.