The Endless Discussion of Race

The election of a bi-racial man to the nation's highest elective office was a seminal moment in the history of this nation. That the previous two Secretaries of State were also African-American hinted at the progress we have made; Barack Obama's election put an unusually strong exclamation mark on it.

Interestingly enough, President Obama played the racial card both ways during the campaign--and in neither sense do I see anything negative in it. He worked hard to declare himself "post-racial" and to urge the nation to "move beyond" faded paradigms of race and politics. He openly appealed to white voters across the country--just as he appealed to black, brown and yellow. Conversely, his candidacy was consumed with race. With almost nothing to fall back upon in terms of experience, Barack Obama ran as an autobiography, the story of a man whose race(s) dominated his experience on this planet to an extraordinary degree. Additionally, his status as a bi-racial man in no small part aided his run for the Presidency. His thin resume in a white man yields, well....John Edwards.

Now--just weeks into his candidacy--his Attorney General (the first black AG) Eric Holder tells an audience that we are a "...nation of cowards..." when it comes to talking about race, and that the "conversation" on race must continue. News this morning is that the dialogue will continue and expand. The only conclusion I can reach in this is that there is a sense within the Obama Administration that there is insufficient attention paid to the matter of race in American, and it is their job to stir it up.

I disagree. Our nation has faced up to its scandalous past and has emerged better and stronger. Enslavement of fellow human beings and the deprivation of civil rights were great blights upon the honor and goodness of this nation, and that we struggled mightily to overcome them both is to our credit. Lingering racism has been reduced to the irreducible sum of that which individually exists within human hearts, rather than the government sponsored and sanctioned variety that dominated our history for so long. We are a different nation, and it is time to recognize that.

The problem now is that there are simply too many people whose lives and careers are invested heavily in the race industry, an industry whose life blood is division. Such investment leaves race merchants blind to the true progress that has been made and unwilling to consider the possibility that their usefulness has waned. Many people (myself included) believe that Barack Obama's election shows better than any other sign just how far the issue has come, and just how silly it is to keep talking about "how far we have to go". Rinku Sen--quoted in the article linked to here--sees it differntly. "I think that the line is, 'We've elected the black president, and now we're post-racial and everybody should just shut up.' It's very dismissive," Sen said. "We did elect the first black president, but people seem to forget that it was a hard campaign."

A hard campaign? You mean harder than Bush v. Dukakis (Willie Horton) or Bush v. Gore (recount, Supreme Court)? But then, what's so bad about a hard campaign? We are after all, electing the leader of the free world. By what measure was it hard? It could not possibly have been press coverage of the minority candidate--I think we can all agree he was well-treated at the very least. No, the bottom line is that Rinku Sen's life and prosperity depends on the notion that the "conversation" must continue and that "we have far to go". All evidence to the contrary.