The Long, Long Road

While I am heartened by the election of a black president, arguably the most powerful person in the world, I don’t believe for one second that we are a “post-racial” society. Last night, I listened to a convenience store clerk rant about the “Black House” and speculate that, instead of an Easter egg roll, they’d be having a watermelon roll followed by a chittlin’ dinner.

The clerk obviously hadn’t seen any menus that have been published for State events. They’re impeccable and don’t include any digestive tract organs. He should be so lucky to eat so well.

That the President’s wife is planting a garden with 55 varieties of veggies, fruit and herbs, including arugula and Thai basil, 10 types of lettuce and a berry patch somehow escaped him. That the President himself is highly educated and has never lived in the South or Texas (two totally different places) and has a taste for haute cuisine also escaped him.

The man who was ranting is obviously unhappy and needs someone to blame on a fundamental level. His life went wrong at some point, so now he’s old and bitter. And it’s always easier to assign blame than to accept responsibility for the life one creates when that life doesn’t pan out as expected.

While I can share his frustrations, I cannot share his opinions.

My life has taken me places I didn’t expect. Some of them have been good and others not so much, but the destinations I’ve arrived at have been largely because of my own actions. It’s not the government’s fault or anyone else’s, other than my own.

I cannot demonize the President for the results of things I did long before he was even a Senator any more than I can assume his race matters one little bit. When I voted, I did not vote for a “person of color”. I voted for a person.

Until descriptions like “person of color” or even “African-American” become meaningless, we will not be in a “post-racial” society. Until they’re used simply to describe someone’s appearance without any tinge of implying character or assuming behavior, we won’t be there.

These are difficult times, and we all look for villains to blame for our particular difficulties. Whether it’s a bigoted clerk or someone calling for the heads of AIG on a platter (literally), we’re displacing blame. The blame rests squarely on our collective shoulders; we let this happen, and it’s our fault.

Democracy requires engagement of the people, and as a people, we don’t tend to get very engaged until it hits us in the pocket book. By that time it’s usually too late.

Now we’re playing the blame game. It’s everyone’s fault except our own.

When blame comes up, so does race. And/or religion. It’s always the blacks or the Hispanics or the Catholics or the Jews that are responsible. It’s never us.

As long as scapegoats are necessary, we won’t live in a post-racial society. Inbred bigotry will prevail.

Stereotypes are hard to kill and only die with the people who believe them. So until we have an elderly generation that believes that there’s more to a person than the color of their skin or the god they worship, we won’t be post-racial.

That’s a long, long road ahead.