It is hard to believe that we have entered the Twenty-first Century and we still have the ignorant ghosts of racism still haunting us. The attitude towards blacks by some white people around our country is amazing to me, sometimes.
Our country was founded on the belief that we are to be open-minded about all creeds from around the world, but yet our biggest flaw in our history has been the black issue. Even our Founding Fathers owned slaves, which is hard to understand, coming from men who professed such open-minded beliefs about the citizens of a nation. As a teacher, it is a question that is often asked – how could the creators of this great nation have been so short-sighted? I can only answer that as progressive and intelligent as they were, they weren’t perfect.
Slavery has got to be America’s most immense skeleton in the proverbial closet. Over a hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln ‘freed’ the slaves, there is still this mentality in many parts of our country that the black race is inferior to the white one. How can so many people feel this way? Didn’t we just elect a black president? Hell, there were enough open-minded people who overlooked the coincidental fact that Obama’s middle name was Hussein.
There is an air of paranoia and an addictive embrace to very primitive thinking processes in America now and I feel that it has not been well addressed. As more and more people recognize the power of the internet, these ridiculous views are able to be shared to everyone who wants to hear them. This has created an upsurge of conspiracy theories that include ridiculous Zionist plots to overthrow the government and the fictitious connections of black musicians to the Illuminati, of all things. All one has to do is look these topics up on YouTube to see these idiotic beliefs posted to the world.
Although things have gotten better for blacks in America since the civil rights movements of the 1960s, there is still much work to do. Cornel West mentions in his book Race Matters that one problem facing blacks today is the lack of community among themselves. But West published these ideas in the 1990s and it’s another world now. A world where more people claim to be open-minded, while those who still live in their racially-bias existence have become more intolerant as African Americans celebrate more success.
This lack of community that West discusses should not be for blacks to bear alone. It should be a community of people regardless of race, creed, religion, sex, sexual preference, etc; all helping each other overcome the ignorance that exists in some circles today. These issues need to be continually addressed and squashed down whenever possible, for whatever battle one minority faces today, another will face tomorrow.
“A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.” ~ Cornel West
Scott Dee