The Observer, April 13, 2007
Volume XXXIX, Issue 24
Race still a dominant issue in the U.S.
After Hurricane Katrina, affirmative action, and that atrocious movie Crash, one wonders if race relations in the United States have really progressed. While racism has definitely moved away from the most blatant broad and openly hostile forms, it has not necessarily meant that as a society, we have moved beyond it.
Arguments about race now must be backed up and defended by data, which almost obfuscates the true arguments beneath. As the Feb. 1 edition of The Economist revealed, there are over 1.1 million African-Americans who earn over $100,000 a year. Such a figure like this is often made with the best intentions but is one that raises rather deceptive questions.
Why are we even paying attention to race if we have reached a level of relative parity? It takes a number out of context and contextualizes the issue into a scale that is easily graspable and measurable. This is just one example of how talk about race has become befuddled in our society.
The problem with race relations is not the lack of legislation or activism but rather the lack of honesty in our public discourse about it. One revelatory aspect of the film Crash was the positive reaction of the American public to its blatant and ham-fisted moral messages expressed through caricatured racial interactions. Lauded for being honest about racial dynamics in the United States, I felt that it instead was similar to a governmental propaganda film during World War II.
Recently, a friend and I were driving through East Cleveland on a quest to alleviate my hacking cough at a Rite-Aid. As my friend was pumping gas, he was approached by a man who asked for a ride. He told us he was an Evangelical youth minister from out of town and was in Cleveland in order to get his daughter a kidney transplant at University Hospitals.
He then proceeded to tell us an emotional story about how his car had broken down and how he had been walking in the cold for hours. It wasn't until we were about several miles off when serious alarm bells started to ring when he asked for $40. He claimed that this was necessarily in order to help cover the costs of a taxi home. He gave us very dramatic reassurances that he would promptly mail back the money.
Unfortunately, after we dropped him off with the cash, my friend and I realized that we had not given him any contact information. It was a silent drive back to campus and I realized that we had been avoiding the question of whether preconceived notions had influenced any of our decisions that night. A friend later said, "You just don't pick up those kinds of people, of any race." Had cultural notions influenced us from realizing that he was quite simply a con-artist with a incredible story that few suckers would believe? At this point, I'm still not entirely sure.
The problem is that our national discourse about race relations is fundamentally dishonest. Our honesty has been relegated to the realm of humor with immeasurable racist jokes and our thoughts about race allow us the false luxury of believing that we have moved beyond them.
