Posted by
flagwaver on Sunday, February 03, 2008 9:44:23 AM
The history of race relations in America is a subject that we cannot get away from, because in all honesty race is a national obsession in this country. Hardly anything that we do is truly free from the issue of race; not politics, not sports, not entertainment, and not even religion. Race touches it all, in either positive or negative ways.
One of the things that continue to make race this explosive issue with us is that we want to fool ourselves about the issue and its history. We want to believe, as we are taught in schools all our lives, that race relations in America is a string of unbroken progress. We like to look at it in an unbroken line that is always getting better: first there was slavery, then there was freedom, then there was the Civil Rights era, and now everything is hunky-dory. But the real history of race relations in this nation is not an unbroken line of progress, but is more of a set of fits and starts. In many instances, it is a situation where we take 1 step forward and 3 steps back.
For example, most people have the naïve idea that after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments were passed that life was suddenly much better for blacks in America. Well, it was for a little while, but pretty soon the clock seemed to be rolling backwards towards slavery. The SCOTUS started finding ways to invalidate the enforcement provisions in civil rights legislation, and it eventually helped to usher in the Jim Crow era with its disgraceful decision in Plessy. All of the gains made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War for blacks, those that untold thousands of soldiers died for and a president was assassinated for championing, were taken away. 1 step forward, 3 steps back.
Flash forward to the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights era. During this period of time, blacks were putting their very lives at risk have their God-given rights as citizens of this country respected; leaders like Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and Malcolm X arose to demand that blacks be treated as men and women…nothing more and nothing less. Yet, while all of this was going on, the federal government was actively creating segregated neighborhoods and suburbs all over America. For every step blacks took forward, the government was pushing them at least one step back.
But even with all of this history, we today have the chance to do better. Right now, today is the best we have ever seen in terms of racial relations in this nation. We share our music, our foods, our tastes, our lives with one another in ways that were not imaginable just 30 years ago. As we move forward, we are going to have to rethink this social construct that we call race as we continue to intermarry and share our lives together. And when we rethink the issue of race, I hope we can come to an agreement that while it matters, it should nit be the predominant thing in our lives. Moving forward I hope we can honestly start to look at each other and judge one another “not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.”