Let's Talk About Race

From AlterNet:

I'm calling on my black brothers and sisters to rise above the "vile epithet" and realize that the problem rests not in us but those who feel it necessary to try to demean us.

I'm also calling on the guardians of P.C. to do likewise. Don't destroy the reputation of people because of their idiotic faux pas. A person who says “nigger” doesn't tell you anything about the person who said it, and it's not the time to come to blows or feel terminally offended. Even the redneck cops in law enforcement agencies, who try to bait you into a confrontation by calling you nigger (I've had this happen to me too, and played it as cool as a master poker player) are dumbfounded when you let it run off your back. But these same coppers wouldn't hesitate to go into a burning building to rescue some black children. Things are infinitely more complex than the P.C. police would have us believe.

Trying to initiate a brutally honest conversation about race among blacks and whites is like trying to pull an elephant up a hill with a string. Standard reactions include "Can we talk about something else?," "I'm not prejudiced" and that time-worn phrase "Some of my best friends are black."

It's all bullshit. We've all been tainted by prejudice, and it influences us all, in small and large ways.

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Over the last few years, especially as voting becomes more and more irrelevant to the political process, I've often thought that the single most lasting legacy of the civil rights era is that white Americans think they're no longer racist if they stop using the "N" word, and they feel deeply insulted if you tell them they're racist anyway. Look, we, that is, white Americans, have been brought up in a culture full of racist stereotypes, a culture that consciously turns a blind eye to chronic poverty in the African American community, that continually locks blacks out of upper level management and public office. How could we not be influenced by that? How could we not carry at least some racist attitudes within us, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not?

Tainted water means tainted fish, and our culture is tainted, just as we are.

We really do need to have that "brutally honest conversation" about race, but in order to do so, whites must first be honest with themselves: the whole racism-happened-in-the-past attitude, the whole racism-is-something-only-bad-people-do concept has got to go. If we can't even admit that the problem exists, things will remain the same. And that's fucked up.

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