Gene's Blog

Racism in the United States

The campaign and subsequent election of Barack Obama as President of the United States brought out into the open the ugly underbelly of racism that has existed in the United States since the beginning. It’s always been here, it just sort of went underground with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the end of legal segregation.

Since then we’ve pretended it doesn’t exist, people would get incensed over any suggestion that were racist. But the idea that this country is a bastion for Caucasians has never left. Affirmative action has been under attack since it began. The ugliness that is life in the southern states was exposed in the movie The Help, starring Viola Davis. I grew up in Minnesota in the 50’s and 60’s, I knew about racism but I had NO idea how ugly it really was until I saw that movie.

When President Obama was elected, racism came out of the dirty closet it has been hiding in for decades. Suddenly, or so it seemed, lynching cartoons, the “N” word, the stereotypes were all over right wing media. Infamously, Senator Mitch McConnell said in 2010 when his racist party took control of the Senate that their top priority, only priority, was to make President Obama a one term president. They failed, of course. They’ll always fail.

Demographics show two things of real interest, the percentage of white voters has been dropping 1% to 2% every election since 1994. This is a good thing. The second demographic of note is that by 2043 the United States will be less than half white. That will never change. There are those now who are trying to stave that off but they’ll fail. The first two states to fall below 50% white will be Texas and Arizona in the 2020’s. I can’t think of two better, MANY are extremely close to as purely evil as those two but they top the list of horrible places for people of color.

The campaign and election (though whether that actually happened or was somehow stolen is yet to be determined) of Donald Trump in 2016 during which he ran on an extremely racist agenda further emboldened racist whites, mostly but not all, male, to express their vitriol publicly in every social media platform in existence, in marches, in rallies, boldly going where no racist cowards had dare go in half a century. 

America is a deeply racist country, that is going to change and it can’t happen soon enough for me. I only hope I live to see it happen. I wonder what it will be like as this country grows ever more diverse. Our strength has always been our diversity, our ability to be separate ethnicities, religions, agnostic, atheist and still work together for the common good. We’ve lost a lot of that in the last decade. It is something we’ll get back but not until my generation, the baby boomers and even more the generation before us die off and get out of the way of the future. 

Our foreign policy, our educational system, our political alliances are all going to undergo dramatic change as our diversity increases. The 2018 elections brought an unprecedented number of women and people of color into the mainstream political process. It’s about time. It’s actually long past time. As one looks around at the country, the world, one realizes that this is what men have built. It is not good, it is not kind, it is not compassionate and it is not just. That has to change, it will, I believe it.

There are young people out there now with wonderfully progressive ideas that are being demonized as against American values, but they are not. They are the values espoused by Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty. It is my greatest desire to see this nation become great again, not in the way Trump envisions it, but in the way our forefathers did. One nation, under one constitution with liberty and justice for all. It’s a grand vision and it’s in process of happening now. I can’t wait. 

If today brings even one choice your way,
Choose to be a Bringer of the Light :^) gene