Post by Spider on Nov 20, 2010 13:57:01 GMT -5
www.uab.edu
Sydney Smith,
Staff Writer
11/16/2010
Despite Stable Race Relations,
Racism Will Never Go Away
Sydney Smith,
Staff Writer
11/16/2010
Despite Stable Race Relations,
Racism Will Never Go Away
Although the Civil Rights Act was successfully passed in the middle of the twentieth century, race relations in America have still not yet been completely mended – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that new problems have surfaced while old ones have generally been solved.
Segregation is the farthest thing from the public mind, racial violence is less common, and a biracial man has been elected president of the United States.
Racial issues today are much more subtle; blacks and whites aren’t the only contingents in the everyday wars that we fight mentally.
Actually, they never were.
Illegal immigration – Mexico is gaining the most attention for that – has recently added weight to most of these conflicts, but many forget that in the early 1900’s, nativists were against not only legal eastern immigrants, but also Europeans (especially European Catholics).
Layers of history and mentalities of the past have accumulated to create today’s cultural climate.
Blacks were emancipated 145 years ago and given adequate legal protection under the Civil Rights Act around fifty years ago.
Considering the fact that the average life expectancy of Americans is 78.4 years and that history is not everyone’s favorite subject, the world fifty years ago seems like an ancient era. But really, in the context of human history as a whole, this was only yesterday.
Society may have “outlawed racism” or made it a taboo, but the acts of yesterday’s prejudiced attitudes are very much alive today, having manifested themselves physically in the form of black poverty.
It is preposterous that whites should have to pay reparations for slavery or for Jim Crowe laws, that anyone should have to pay for the sins of their fathers, but blacks do suffer from racism that seems to have existed “in the distant past”… just fifty years ago.
I often hear people say, “Man, that was a long time ago. You all are free now.”
It’s only partly true.
I think that spreads a negative mentality; it implies that just because the Civil Rights Act was passed or because we have a half-black president, all the ghettos, black street gangs, crime, and Ebonics should disappear at the snap of a finger.
That is not the case, especially when negative aspects of black culture are glamorized and regurgitated to the youth.
Poverty breeds crime and television proliferates it.
The condition that blacks are in now leads to a host of stereotypes and subtle racial tensions.
It is confusing for some people, with society holding a negative stigma towards stereotyping, especially when they find themselves in situations where stereotyping is unavoidable.
But things are more complicated than fair and unfair stereotypes.
Today’s black-white racial climate is ruled by a number of empty accusations thrown from one side to the other; most of this is blacks feeling that they were wronged by whites in some petty way (“race-card”), or whites saying that blacks are racist or irritatingly obsessive about their oppression for bringing up a seemingly irrelevant past.
None of this is going to change soon.
It would be easy for me to ask, “Can’t we all just get along?” and say that racism is a non-threatening thing of the past, but it isn’t.
It would be even easier for me to say, “Stereotyping is bad and untrue,” but I don’t, because we as humans stereotype everything.
There is no easy answer.
Racism, covert or overt, will never go away, and we should all be thankful that relations between races in America are as stable as they are now; but we should also be knowledgeable about yesterday and how it affects us today.
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