Why Race?

There is resistance mounted to even raising racial issues for discussion. On a recent thread of mine I got comments like “some people are always whining about some perceived racial injustice or slight”, and even further, that there is an “epidemic” of racially-based complaining going on in our dear country that must be resisted by the clear thinking amongst us.

So, why discuss race? I checked, and by my calculation about 16% of the 163 threads I’ve started in my time on A2K have been about race issues (26 of the 163).

To be sure I was fair in my counting, I included threads that are only tangentially about race (Examples of those I consider tangentially about race were Romney’s Lie About Dad Marching with MLK, which was a thread taking a shot at Milt Romney during the last presidential election because he was making a false claim his father had civil rights credibility based on the false claim that he marched with Dr King, and Have I Missed the Limbaugh Mea Culpa?, about how Rush Limbaugh slammed Donovan McNabb as some sort of affirmative action quarterback, and never spoke about him again after McNabb continued racking up kudos and stats.).

Is that an excessive amount of talk about race? Well, that’s for the eye of the beholder. When I have an opinion about something race related, I feel obligated to talk about it. I do it in my real life, and I do it in the cyberspace of A2K, among other places. I think these things need to be regularly surfaced and aired out. I don’t think that addressing them bespeaks anything obsessive or unhealthy. (Just for the record, the people complaining that I obsess too much about race on A2K strangely almost never even show up on the other 84% of my threads, which are not race based. Go figgur.)


On the contrary. I think that there is something to be lost by turning a blind eye and deaf ear to matters of race. I think there is, for instance, danger of giving ground to revisionists and “post-racialists”, who not only would have us believe that our racial past was more hunky-dory than it was, but that discussions of race and especially racial injustice are counterproductive and unnecessary in the present day.

I mean, look at it. It is not always clear by the news and by heeding public discourse that history is moving forwards or back. Just a couple weeks ago, there was a news story about the Texas State Board of Education proposing to change the word “slavery” in history texts to “the Mid-Atlantic Triangular Trade”, to sideline Thomas Jefferson in favor of highlighting “significant contributions” of confederate slave owners.

A couple of years ago I became aware of a pamphlet titled “Southern Slavery, As It Was” that was being used as part of the instruction in a private school in Cary, N.C. A representative passage from the 43 page pamphlet, describing the slave state, reads “There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.” This was being used to teach young people in the last couple of years. I think there has been a recurring attempt by some to provide the United States in general, but the South in particular with a kind of human rights alibi – 145 years post slavery.

If children can be taught that slaves were a bunch of “Happy darkies”, and that American slavery was simply some market-driven enterprise run by a bunch of otherwise ethical Lee Iacocca-types, then I think we are in danger of beginning to think backward out of our refusal to look – honestly – backward…

…and honestly at race in the present day. With talking-head powerhouses like Limbaugh and Beck making racially tinged proclamations, with legal, fiscal and educational inequities still extant, with political leaders and those who covet political leadership in disagreement about racial issues, why wouldn’t clear thinking individuals want to include matters of race into the regular fare?

As a biracial (Black/Filipino) man who grew up constantly aware of ethnic and racial stigma and dogma ; as a partner in an interracial marriage who has to negotiate situations that may or may not be nurturing to diversity, as a career military person who made treating soldiers with respect and justice regardless of demographics a priority, as a counseling grad student with a heart for teachers and teaching who has to be aware of the influence of multicultural backgrounds – I happen to think race needs to be talked about.

So I wanted to write this post - mostly to assure my friends at A2K that I care deeply about a lot of things - not just race. I guess I wanted to tell them not to believe the hype that ole Snood is just another whiner looking for a handout, sympathy or anything else because I'm Black.

And to tell those who don’t bother to post on the majority of my threads that have nothing to do with race, and only show up on the ones that do to whine “here we go again” – you are truly irrelevant, in the purest sense of the word, to me.