What Color Is Racism?

AG Eric Holder celebrated Black History Month by calling us a "nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race. "Who me?" "Why, some of my best friends are...." As Leonard Pitts reminds us, while Black History Month 2009 winds away into memory, we continue to evade the historical truth. The Founding Fathers, for the most part, were racists. Abraham Lincoln was a racist. And on and on the sorry tale goes, right up to the present. This nation was born in the original sin of racism and that sin still thrives in the Land O'The Free and The Home O'The Brave. If this is (fair & balanced) truth to power, so be it.

[x Miami Fishwrap]
Thank Holder For The Reminder
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

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afford alright americans around attracts bad black bring deliver discussion e-mail education eric fatigue games hate history holder ignorance intolerant jr la leonard loud martin nation ones overcome people play race racial racist refuse reminder reports silence something speech stop stubborn subject talk thank thousand voices white wonder years yell

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It is not precisely true that Americans don't talk about race.

Race informs our discussions of everything from crime to education to who got picked for American Idol. We talk race in the lunchroom with people who look like us, yell race at the television when irked by people who don't. We read race in our newspapers and magazines, then write race in letters and e-mails to editors. January rolls around and we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. February sweeps in and we observe Black History Month.

We talk about race, alright. We are just really bad at it.

As you may have guessed, the foregoing is occasioned by a speech Eric Holder, the nation's first African-American attorney general, gave last week. In it, he characterized the United States as "a nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing our tortured racial history. There is, however, more to it than that.

A large component of my work for nearly 20 years has involved talking about, and persuading my fellow Americans to talk about, race. After hundreds of columns, dozens of speeches and thousands of face-to-face and e-mail exchanges with Americans of all stripes, I consider myself something of an expert on the subject. And I'm here to tell you that race is like a four-car pileup on the freeway: it simultaneously attracts us and repels.

Because of this, we can't not talk about it. Yet at the same time, we can't talk about it either. At least not in any sort of honest, intelligent or sustained way, because doing so requires cross-cultural trust we do not have and takes us places we prefer not to go.

So we talk about race, but we don't. More often, we yell about race. Or talk around race. Or deliver self-righteous monologues on race. All of it tainted by a gaping ignorance of, and stubborn refusal to grapple with, the hateful, hurtful history that makes talking about race necessary in the first place.

We play games instead. Many African Americans lie in wait to cry "Got'cha!" when some hapless white person inadvertently says some questionable thing, as though innocent ignorance were indistinguishable from actual malice.

As when a white analyst on TV's Golf Channel said something dumb about Tiger Woods, and the Rev. Al Sharpton demanded her head, telling a reporter, "What she said is racist. Whether she's a racist . . . is immaterial."

Loud, Intolerant Voices

We play games. Many white Americans go about with fingers in ears singing "la la la la" at the top of their lungs rather than hear inconvenient truths that challenge their fantasies of how we have overcome. You can bring them a thousand anecdotes, you can bury them in studies from universities, think tanks and the federal government itself, documenting ongoing racial bias in housing, employment, education, criminal justice, and they will still tell you all that stuff ended yesterday.

This is what I have repeatedly seen. And small wonder, if you are black, you stop trying to have substantive discussions about race with white people: They refuse to listen. Small wonder, if you are white, you stop speaking freely about race with black people: Every little thing is racism with them.

And small wonder, in recent years, the discussion on race has come to be dominated by loud, intolerant voices using the reach they are afforded by the Internet and the intellectual cover they are provided by conservative extremism to promulgate a neo-racism more raw than anything the mainstream has seen in years. Small wonder the Southern Poverty Law Center reports the number of hate groups in this country has risen over 40 percent since 2000.

We live in an era where the bad people among us are feeling emboldened by the silence and compassion fatigue of the good ones. But after all we've been through, after all we have done and suffered to bring about change, we cannot afford silence or fatigue, cannot afford to turn the conversation over to the voices of loud intolerance.

So thank Eric Holder for the reminder. If good people do not lead this discussion, the bad ones happily will. ♥

[Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004. A former writer for Casey Kasem's radio program "American Top 40," Leonard Pitts, Jr. was hired by the Herald as a pop music critic in 1991. By 1994 he was writing about race and current affairs in his own column. His column was syndicated nationally, and his 1999 book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood was a bestseller. After the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, Pitts wrote an impassioned column headlined "We'll Go Forward From This Moment" that was widely circulated on the Internet and frequently quoted in the press. In the column, Pitt bluntly expressed his anger, defiance and resolve to an unnamed evil terrorist: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard." Pitts attended the University of Southern California and earned a BA in English.]

Copyright © 2009 Miami Herald Media Company

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