shhhh! it's racial!

I would like to broach another subject, which, while more contentious than shoes, has been on my mind a lot lately.

That subject is race and the question I have for anyone who reads this is: why is it that it’s always a huge issue when minorities, especially blacks, bring up the subject of race and/or race relations?

I had a situation on a message board (AskAndy) where I happened upon a discussion of Southern preppy men’s dressing habits. One poster midway into the discussion brought up a certain amount of consternation about the interference of Northerners in the South, specifically “people who come in from other places and tell us what to do” and made reference to “The War Between the States and the Recent Unpleasantness.”

Another poster, the originator of the thread, asked for clarification on the latter reference to the “Recent Unpleasantness;” as to whether it meant the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement. I offered that the reference was towards the latter and suggested that the “Recent Unpleasantness,” as I understood it to mean, could have been avoided if theses supposed Southern gentleman had not denied basic human rights to the black citizens of their region.

The last statement of mine, which admittedly was controversial, unleashed a firestorm of comments to my detriment. Not only did I not understand history and I could not read, according to them, I was bringing up old wounds and I should just “get over it’ as if the indignities of hundreds of years of slavery could be made up for by forty or so years of forced legal racial equality that is questioned by conservative scholars and average Joes alike, with major parts of key civil rights legislation still under debate.

The worst part was when several posters contended that the Civil War was solely about populism rather than being mostly about the preservation of slavery, and called my opinion a “child’s tale.” I responded to those posters by wondering aloud how forced human labor advanced the notion of state’s rights. I explained to them that their “child’s tale” turned into a hellish nightmare for my relatives, and aftershocks of this mentality still reverberate though modern society. That did not go over well either.

What I wondered to myself as I dodged the bullets of thought from people who supposedly only wanted to talk about clothes but who subtly slipped in proud stories of “southern heritage” which involved the enslavement and second class status of an entire race of people was that while (rightfully so) Jewish people can talk about the Holocaust without scorn and Native Americans can talk about the decimation of their communities from forced migration to the deserts and hinterlands of America, somehow when it comes to blacks discussing racial inequality, we’re somehow trying to “start something.”

Despite their assumption about me and about blacks in general, I am not a contentious person when it comes to race. I’m not a person who feels like white people should have to walk with their heads bowed in shame for what has been wrought into the black race infinitely. I don’t think that black people should automatically be put in positions of power because of a quota or some kind of “payback.” Hell, I’m not even a person that talks about race very much. A lot of, if not most, blacks feel in similar ways to my opinion.

But racism, despite massive progress on the part of all of us over the past half-century and legislation to hamper its growth, is still rampant. Any acknowledgement to the contrary is unrealistic and smacks of an attempt to bury the issue. Yet any kind of discussion on how to eliminate what’s left of Jim Crow still gets shot down, especially if brought up by a black person.

I am a Southerner. I am proud of my Southern heritage. By the virtue of race-mixing, forced and otherwise, by my forebears, I have Jewish, Native American and white blood in me along with the predominant black blood. Though I don’t know if there were any slave-owners back in my family history, there is a good chance there are. I have just as much to answer for from my white forebears as they do from theirs. Yet I must also live with the racism aimed towards blacks and other minorities that my black, Jewish and Native American forebears do.

So where is the fear in having an honest discussion about this subject? Why is it that everyone wants to pretend that it didn’t happen and isn’t still happening? I’m not blaming every white person for racism, and no black I know is either. Is it just avoiding the unpleasantness? Dodging a bullet? Doth I protest too much? Or too little? Any answers would be appreciated.