Folks, we have an elephant in the middle of our national living room. And I don’t mean the Republican Party. It’s race.
Oh, we try to ignore him. Political correctness has most people in this country afraid to get into true, in-depth discussions about race. Worse yet, being PC has people trying to come off like they are really “colorblind” in their daily dealings.
Pardon me while I try to stop laughing.
No one is colorblind, neither the minorities nor the Caucasians. We just don’t want to admit that color matters — for some of us only a little; for others a lot — but it does.
And it will keep influencing our thoughts, particularly with the bombshell from the US Census Bureau that non-Hispanic Whites will cease to be the majority as soon as 2042, eight years earlier than previously predicted.
I’ve already noticed a lot of Whites fretting about this fact. They are saying they will be a minority in 2042. They’re already panicking and missing the point that they will simply be less than half the population. They won’t truly be the minority; Hispanics will clock in at one-third and Blacks will be around 15 percent. Truth be told, everyone will be a minority in 2042, just some more minor than others.
I also find that a surprising number of Whites seem worried that if Barack Obama becomes president, he will somehow elevate all Blacks to positions of power and demote all the Whites, as if that were even possible. Of course, I also see a frightening number of Blacks who think a darker-hued president will suddenly mean an end to race inequities — oh, it’s a small number, but any number of my people being that delusional about race relations scares me.
So, like it or not, we are still ruled by color-vision.
Racial decisions of the past and racial inequities of all sorts that continue today impact our lives deeply, in both subtle and dramatic ways. Slavery is gone and the Civil Rights movement made great waves in the ’60s and ’70s, yet we still tend to define each other by skin.
Even here in Maine, where my six years have taught me that overall folks here are good and decent people, perceptions about people of differences abound. Certain areas or towns with higher numbers of people of color tend to be called “bad” areas, I’ve noticed. In Portland it seems the Kennedy Park area wears that crown; I’ve only been there a handful of times but I it reminded me of a more urban and multicultural area and that’s neither good nor bad, to me. Sure, a transient was killed by a group of young men there recently, and that is tragic, but the sketchy details say it was a “multicultural group” and I’m already waiting for some groaning about “See, that’s what happens when non-whites move in.”
Yet crime exists all over the state and statistically, the vast majority is committed by Whites; how could it be otherwise with as few people of color here as there are? But I don’t hear people fret about White-committed crimes. I hear them fret about drug dealers and gang members from Boston or other big cities who come to Maine (translation: Blacks and Latinos).
Different races do have differences in how they do some things, and it’s probably long since time that we honestly discussed our differences in a constructive manner. But more important to deal with are our shared concerns. I bet all of us are wondering about keeping our homes warm this winter and our cars gassed up. And how about the skyrocketing cost of food?
Most of us all want the same thing and that’s just a good life. Young, old, black, white; we are all just chasing after a slice of that America dream — if it still really even exists. Spending too much energy looking at our differences just puts that farther out of reach.
Shay Stewart-Bouley can be reached atdiversecity_phoenix@yahoo.com.
