Racism

While it is true and important that we have made the historic decision as a nation to elect a minority of our country for President, there has been a backlash of racist activity directed at our President-elect. To some people, this is shocking, to others, it's normal, and other people don't care. The fact is, if someone believes that racism is dead in our country they really haven't been paying attention.

Reading the comments section of the article posted above (which was actually pretty intelligent for internet commentary), I found several mentions to the completely erroneous "reverse racism" targeted at white people who criticize Obama or would vote for McCain. I'm getting into controversial territory here, but I would say that there is racism against many different groups of people from other groups of people, but that what is most detrimental is racism with power behind it. An individual that hurts another individual based on their race is wrong, but an entire group of people being classified as less human and denied equal opportunities and rights for centuries is an atrocity. These things are not able to occur unless there is massive power behind the racist ideals and the effects of this oppression are long-lasting. White men control most of our nation's wealth and are a majority of the representation in our government and while it is much more likely for a black man to go to prison than college and affirmative action is unacceptable "reverse racism", ivy league institutions use legacy admissions to continue their tradition of upper class white students.

The point is that there cannot be "reverse racism" if there is no power coming in the reverse direction. Everyone holds some sort of power over others, but the massive weight of white privilege in our country changes the dynamic. The other interesting relationship between the comments about "reverse racism" and the list of racist incidents relating to the election is that they are all absent of concrete consequences. I know that the emotional distress of seeing a burning cross on your lawn and the history that evokes can be incredibly powerful and overwhelming, but it is very different than the systemic racism that exists and persists in our country. In my view, these are the things that should be viewed as atrocious and vile, that we do not give a portion of our population the same opportunities due to where they live, how impoverished they already are, and the color of their skin and what it means to our country historically.

There has been a new attitude of "Now there is no excuse for young black men; it has become apparent that they can now become president." There are plenty of reasons that young black men and women still do not have the opportunity or belief that they could one day become president. When you spend every day living in the midst of extreme poverty and violence, it appears that there is no way out, and in many ways this is true. The more symbolic, threatening, and personal incidents from this article are more representational of a mood that still exists, a personal belief that one person is inherently better than another, a persistent hatred. But the systemic problems are the ones that make my skin crawl, because we are legally allowing oppression and not viewing it as so. We go on ignoring the real problems facing our nation and black communities and we will forget that we are trying to reach true equality.