It has been put forth…that you can petition the Lord with prayer!
Sorry, that was a Jim Morrison moment. But. It has indeed been put forth that, since the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, crying “racism” is a knee-jerk liberal response to…everything. You know what I’m talking about. It was a cynical move by the collective Right to combat any actual racism, by positing the theory that liberals say it all the time about any criticism of the president, who happens to be (half) black. I imagine that that happens sometimes, I don’t know.
So what about the actual racism? Of course it’s there and of course it is widespread and if you had the miserable inclination you could find it everywhere on right-wing sites and so forth. Unfortunately it also pops up when racist people talk amongst themselves, such as on Facebook. They disguise themselves as Christians and Southerners and patriots but…it’s hard to gloss over words like “black bastard” and the like. You can use that in a sentence: “Ever since that black bastard was elected…” This is in public discourse, you can imagine how it may alter in private.
I don’t know people like this, or at least I like to think I don’t, but they are out there and they may even be related in some way. Racists. And so I just had to write this to express my pleasure in seeing someone like this called out for their racism and being compelled to pull back and apologize. It happened. It was real and it happened. Of course there are racists. Some embarrassed enough to feel shame, but I’m sure plenty more who don’t.
It happens that, through adoption, there are two African-American kids in my relation, both close in age to my own daughters. We spend a lot of time with them and it is long beyond the point where any of this is even a thought. At daycare the kids are spoken to only in Spanish; we do our best to try and remember and learn some ourselves. This isn’t a source of pride or anything, it just IS. Chicago, Hispanic, Black, White, whatever…we’re not in a bubble, the kids aren’t going to grow up in a bubble.
I’m happy that someone was forced to see something they might not have seen, had they not been confronted, but I am not wildly optimistic that any of this is going to change fundamentally for the bubbleheads. They will certainly still speak to each other in racist tones–publicly or behind the Bible Belt–and long for the good old days, but I would hope they are a dying breed. The culture wars have long been won and one gets a feeling that they might recognize as much.
Anyway, speaking ill of a minority might not be as appealing when you wake up to find yourself in the lesser half.