Exactly a year ago, I began this blog with some comments about racism in the U.S., the gist being that electing an African-American President was a positive step on the road to conquer racism, but we were far from eliminating the problem.
Lately, the recent unguarded blurts of Senator Harry Reid (with his now-infamous "light skinned ... Negro" comment), Democratic National Chairman Michael Steele ("honest Injun"), former President Bill Clinton (who reportedly disparaged Obama as someone who should have been bringing him coffee), and even disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (who said he was "blacker" than Obama) brought the question of racism back into the forefront of the national dialog for a few days. Those who hadn't been caught uttering some off-tone remark readily became pots, who called the kettles black (er...well, let's say they criticized the kettles) and demanded resignations.
Some of these cases are ambiguous, and other statements say more about those who made them than about their targets. Wasn't Bill Clinton just suggesting that Obama was scarcely wet behind the ears in politics, compared to himself or Kennedy? Didn't Reid's use of the term "Negro" in this day and age just define him as a guy who's out of touch, an anachronism - an image he already is finding a detriment to his reelection?
Nevertheless, I think we have to say such remarks are fundamentally racist. It's these little offhand remarks - racial innuendo, if you will - that illustrate the depth and breadth of racism remaining in our country. But there are degrees of racism, and these sorts of unthinking remarks are only the tip of an iceberg. It's not just a white-to-black phenomenon, because African Americans and Latinos have their own words and jokes about whites and other groups. When people think they're among friends, or even (in the case of politicians) hoping to play "one of the boys" to win hearts and minds, they will say something in appropriate, and from time to time, such remarks will be overheard or even recorded. Deep down, we all know that probably 90% of those "pots" I mentioned above have at some time in the past been dark-hued little kettles themselves, but they just haven't been caught at it yet.
I wonder if we will ever get to the point where people of one race, or ethnic group, or religion, or even gender, aren't thinking discriminatory thoughts about those of some other group. Maybe we will. I do know we have a long way to go, and that's likely to be one of the last bits of racist thinking to disappear. Even if we succeed in stopping people from actually saying such things, we won't really know they're not thinking them.
People will inevitably assess these incautious outbursts in their own way: There's reason to believe for example that an infantile good-ole-boy Republican, George Allen, lost his bid for the Senate in Virginia four years ago largely because of his reference to an Indian-American as a "makaka" (a term most of us probably hadn't heard before). But I think we need to get beyond the easy partisan shot and be more concerned about whether such comments really reflect a broader record of racist action or thinking. I don't think that's the case in any of the examples cited above, so let's not get distracted. We ought to be more concerned about the kinds of racism that still do serious damage to equality.
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