Ted Rhodes

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency sparked spontaneous eruptions of jubilation in the streets by black and racially mixed crowds across the nation.  A huge celebration of a major change in American culture.  But for many of us, (whit folk) the election of Obama came as no surprise, and merely illustrated what many of us have known for a long time.  That institutional racism in America is dead, and it has been on the slow wane of death for at least the past two decades. 

Of course there are individual racists, and all of us will encounter these people here and there throughout our lives.  But the broad and harmful racism that was rooted in policies of private enterprises and public institutions is long gone.  Obama could not have won the election without the support of white voters.  The argument that a white America that elected a black president still stubbornly holds to its racism is no longer credible. 

How does a nation that has been scarred by the atrocities of slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, overt and covert segregation, job discrimination, and naked racism move on from this point?  The first and most important collective action is to acknowledge that America has moved to a new era, and that our days of separation and racism are over. 

The white community acknowledged this decades ago, but the African American community has been slow to believe it.  Now that the change in collective psyche has come from the white community, the next step must come from within the African American community.  This is one thing that whites cannot do for African Americans.   The African American community must select a new group of leaders.   They must abandon their visceral leaders who exaggerate the perception of white racism, stir division, inspire hatred, or fabricate the notion of white racism where it never existed, and fuel backlash racism within their own ranks.  Instead they must seek out new leaders for this new era. 

African Americans must stop looking at every social injustice through the prism of race.  The cold fact is that most afflictions on the African American community are due to socio-economic conditions.  That many African Americans reside in the bottom quintile of our economic strata is the main cause of this disparity.   Lower quality schools in low income neighborhoods hinder opportunities just as much for white residents as they do for blacks.  In order to move forward, the African American community must assess these issues honestly. 

Our culture must once and for all stop calling attention to race.  With every news item the comment, “the first Black to achieve this,” and “the third black in history to achieve that,” are counter productive.  Do we still hear the same comments about “the fifth Italian American” to achieve such and such?  Further, such comments do not promote a completely integrated society, but rather serve to call attention to differences, and subconsciously further divide us into separate groups.  Leaders of the African American community should speak out against such patronizing attitudes. 

African Americans must now look into the mirror, and confront their own racist attitudes, in the same way the White community did in the Sixties and Seventies.   Resentment, collective grudges, hatred, will only further keep the Black community down.  The African American community must acknowledge the backlash racism brought on by decades of oppression by whites, and move through a process of healing.  Ultimately the community must let it go.   

For example, isn’t voting FOR a candidate simply based on the color of his or her skin just as racist as voting AGAINST a candidate for the same reason?   Aside from racial lines, African Americans should now consider to vote according to ideals.   The African American community is the only remaining group of minority and immigrant groups that still votes as a monolith.  Even a sizable chunk of the Hispanic community votes Republican.  Voting monolithically invites the Democrat Party take the African American community for granted.  Splitting the vote between two parties would give the community more bargaining power. 

To hold on to the old bastions of victimization and insist on further mandated outcomes of racial preference will only prolong and delay the advancement of the African American community.  The African American community should abandon their position of victimhood, and move forward from here with a sense of arrival, acquired equality, collective entitlement, and self confidence. 

Collective entitlement comes not from government handouts, but from recognition that the African American community has finally been admitted to the club.   They ought to stride into the club, not with an air false importance, or with demands that they are owed anything for their long exile.  But rather stroll in with the same sense of casual self confidence of a senior colleague who has contributed as a dues-paying member for many years.