"Racism"

Can we just agree that “racist” is an adjective that has evolved to describe a whole lot of things that aren’t actually racist?

The more that I grow up and step into my own understandings of politics and the broader societal landscape around me, the more that I find myself thinking that we are about two generations away from any real chance at a “post-racial” reality. My generation is absolutely ready for it, but those before us are not. The generation of our grandparents is one of actual racism and bigotry; the kind that segregates schools and sits in the back of a bus. The generation of our parents may have broken color barriers and desegregated school systems, but the process of it all was painful. Our nation’s history of interracial animosity may have been greatly rewritten and redirected during their lifetimes, but the reach of its former ugliness seems difficult to forget, and even more difficult to prevent from defining their continued path forward. They laid a foundation on which they will never truly walk.

Our grandparents did not vote for Obama because he was black. Our parents voted for Obama because he was black. My friends and I voted for Obama with a relative indifference to the color of his skin.

I am not trying to say that racism doesn’t exist in my generation, because it definitely does. Despite all attempts by the African American community to reclaim ownership, the N-word still belongs equally to mouths black and white. However, I think that growing cultural overlays have lessened the deep-rootedness of racism in American society, making it somehow less visceral. Rap/hip-hop culture is nearly as much suburban as it is ghetto, and the most socially relevant and accurate television series on inner-city drug culture (The Wire) was written by a couple of white guys. Media has in many ways leant a certain understanding to cross-cultural differences that removes the “us versus them” and the “they’re different from us” from our personal frames of reference.

In time, I think that this mutual connectedness will serve as a foundation for a truly post-racial society. Much the same way that when I met a college student in Xian, China two years ago whose favorite band was Linkin Park and his favorite show Prison Break, I found myself thinking that the music and movie industries will have as much to do with the eventual downfall of communism as governments will. But, until then, we are left with the Jesse Jacksons and the NAACPs of the world.

Not only do I not agree that Dan Gilbert’s comments regarding Lebron James reflected the mentality of a slave master, I can honestly say that the notion of race did not even cross my mind until Jackson venomously injected it into the conversation. Lebron will be hated in Cleveland the same way that Art Model is- as someone who left a city without hope, not a cotton gin without cloth; his departure televised in primetime for a nation to see, not covered up and hidden along an underground railroad.

Similarly, the NAACP’s labeling of the Tea Party as a racist political faction is ridiculous. Agreed, there are fringe elements of the movement who are racists and bigots. But there are crazy radicals on the fringe of any movement, group, or idea. Some Muslims are terrorists, some Christians are skinheads, some blacks are drug dealers, and some extreme liberals are self-identified anti-Americans. We can no more define the Tea Party by its fringe element than we could Obama by the comments of Reverend Wright, or the Democratic Party by those who held signs of President Bush with a Hitler mustache during his presidency. Disagreeing with a President’s policies is not the same as disparaging his ethnicity.

Pulling the word racism into every single situation involving race does not enlighten our society to its presence, but instead desensitizes us to its evocation. It lessens our individual capacity to differentiate real racism from the nonexistent, and it lessens the power of the term. Racism becomes a card that is pulled whenever the going gets tough, or someone says something we don’t like. The more worn the word becomes, the more we lose the sense that there is a categorical understanding of its definition.

A post-racial society will require restraint and responsibility from both sides of the racial divide. Defining our world through the lens of black and white is lazy. It oversimplifies our problems into too easy of a construct. It’s too confined a perspective, and racism is too important a concept to make so trivial.