Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Race ideology in America

It’s difficult to deal with the Democratic primary without the issue of race rearing its ugly head. While many Americans would like to pretend that they are “blind” to it, it’s simply the refusal to admit it exists. What we saw during the election was the difference between yesterday and tomorrow.

Yesterday, there was us (white) and them (non-white). Identity was entangled in the simplistic explanation of skin color. There was a time for this; a time of Jesse Jackson and Jeramiah Wright; a time of Black Panthers and the KKK. That time, however, is not now. That time was then.

For those of us who came of age and awareness after the race riots, after Jim Crow, after sit ins, after anti-miscegenation laws, the concept of race has a more nuanced feel. While race continues to be a defining characteristic for many people, it is not the only characteristic that we define ourselves by. We have witnessed inter-racial marriages and relationships first hand, and many of us have found that skin tone plays little role in determining attraction or opinion.

We are all different, and yet, underneath, we are all Americans; we are all human. Just as the views of sexuality have progressed from simplistic labels of “normal” and “other” to one that understands that our desires and attractions span a gamut of individuals, we have seen that calling someone “black” or even “white” is rarely instructive.

My heritage is mixed. I am part Italian, English, Scottish and Cherokee. My mother is from Appalachia, and that cultural background is powerful. I have always looked at the inevitable “race” question on school forms and job applications and said “other”. I’m not simply white, nor am I simply Native American. I am a new race, one that has been centuries in the making. I am simply American.

This road has been long, and it has been difficult. Many before us have not survived the long journey, but as each generation begins to dominate the discussion—as mine is beginning to now—the old fears pass just a little further into the hazy memory of yesterday. Like so many before him, and more to come, Barack Hussein Obama is nothing more, and nothing less, than the great melting pot of America, where we have progressed from allowing others to define us as a group to defining ourselves, but still as a group, and now we are finally looking out, not in, for our place. We are simply us: an earth-tone rainbow of humanity.