We've come a long way?

I'm old enough to recall what it was like growing up as a black child in the 1960s, when racism was blatant and in your face, particularly in the South.  Stories told of the experiences of parents and grandparents drove home the outrageous absurdities and horror of racism that was common in the lives of many back then.

Even though I grew up in Washington DC, I eventually had that painful experience that was ultimately  inevitable for most black kids at that time, wherein one day the veil that is the innocence of childhood is lifted and the realization hits that, there is something different about you in society's eyes that makes you less than.  As much as you enjoyed and identified with the adventures and travails of the kids you saw on the various TV shows, all of whom were white, you came to realize that you were not like them, and different in society's view in a negative way.  And that's being charitable.

I used to run errands for my mom to stores in the business district around the corner from where we lived, and it made me uncomfortable and sometimes angry that whenever I went, I would be followed around in the store.  Eventually I realized this happened because they thought I was going to steal something, which didn't make sense to me.  My siblings and I were "raised in the church" so to speak, and the spiritual as well as earthly consequences of stealing was enough to drill home the point that, besides being wrong, it wasn't worth it.

One day, on an errand for my mom, I was cornered and questioned in a threatening manner by the store clerk, assuming I had stole something.  She did this in front of all the customers in the store.  I was more embarrassed than afraid, and in that instance, it hit me: they think I'm "stealing" because I'm black.  It took a lot of discussion and assurances from family to help me dig out from under that psychic ton of bricks.

One outcome of the civil rights movement was that blatant, open displays of overt racism came to be more universally shameful.   People still held racist beliefs and ideas, but this stuff became something that "decent" people didn't openly express in polite society, and it was relegated to private conversations of like minded folk.  Racism was still there, but became more subtle, and the unspoken but widely held implication as expressed by the majority was, out of sight of mind.

Relatively speaking, this didn't last long, as the social acceptance of overt racism came roaring back with the advent of the "conservative" movement during the second campaign of Ronald Reagan.  "Political correctness" was one of the earlier "freedoms" of conservatism that was celebrated, that had the effect of releasing the genie of open bigotry and making  it acceptable in the public sphere again.  A signpost along the way of this process was Reagan infamously opening his campaign in, of all places, Philadelphia, MS, the site of the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman and Cheney.  The underlying racism of the conservative movement was plain, even back then. (And please note that here I am NOT calling all conservatives racists; they're not.)

Fast forward to today.  The public racism that was indulged in under the cover of political correctness in the 1980s seems almost quaint compared to the blatant and ugly racist incidents that have become commonplace today, like this, and this.  The frequency of the occurrence of these incidents, and the relatively laissaez faire nature with which they are treated in the media and society at large have put them on a path to becoming socially acceptable again.

And I have to admit, as jaded as I and many black folk have become regarding the natural inclination to expect that people's better natures will always shine through, the incidents that have occurred since the election of Obama as the first black president seem to drive home the point that racist ugliness will always be with us, that it is a feature of our national DNA, and that we as a nation will never achieve the level of egalitarian enlightenment, a feature of which would be the eradication of a tolerance of racism in the public sphere.  We instead appear to be moving in the opposite direction.

The advent of Obama and "hope and change" carried with it by implication that we had "come a long way."  I voted for Obama but I still did not believe America was ready for a black president.  On election day, even though it became clear as the day wore on, that Obama was on the verge of making history, many blacks felt that something, somehow, would happen at the last minute to prevent that.  After his victory had been certified and made official, I felt sad for many of my white friends who actually believed, that Obama's election somehow signaled that racism was dead.  How could a nation elect the most hated and feared talisman of embedded racism, a black man, to lead it, and still be racist?

Instead, it appears that rather than being a sign of enlightenment, the election of Obama appears more to have been the removal of a scab off a rancid, festering and infected wound, aggravated over time by lack of any serious remediation.  Rather than having "come a long way," more and more it appears that we are coming full circle.

These recent racist eruptions and incidents like them used to make me angry.  Resigned to the fact that "we've come a long way" is just something that is said to avoid dealing with the festering wound that is racism, we either laugh ruefully or just shake our heads.   These incidents say more about the hearts and "minds" of their instigators who seem to relish wallowing in this ugly behavior, and the obvious fear they have of the changes underway in our nation.

You almost feel sad for them.