I enjoy reading my colleague Maureen Dowd's columns, and usually she's right on point. However, on race, in which she devoted a tiny portion of her column in Sunday's New York Times, she clearly misses the mark. She dresses down Attorney General Eric Holder for, as she called it, "lecturing" or giving a "sermon" on race and says the election of Barack Obama "was supposed to get us past" talk about race in America. Is she kidding?
Yes, Obama has much on his plate, including saving many of the fat cats on Wall Street so the economy doesn't completely collapse and the millions of people who (by no fault of their own) are caught in the middle. Many of those are minorities and the poor whites in this country who do not live the life of highly-paid and well-connected business folks, pols and journalists.
It may be easy for Dowd to clamor that we should be a "post-racial" society now that America has elected its first African-American president who installed the first ever black attorney general. It is not that simple for many who are of the darker complexion of our wonderful American melting pot. In the age of Obama, our work is not yet done on the subject of race. His election was not about getting past it. His election was, among other things, about addressing the issue. If a black attorney general or an African-American president does not bring it up to spark the discussion, who really will? The president began this in his Philadelphia speech during the campaign.
Dowd's suggestion that "the president has other issues that demand his passion" is at best troubling coming from a writer of significant influence and esteemed credentials. At worst, it is a slap in the face to so many Americans who have fought for equal justice and liberty for all Americans -- black and white. Wouldn't Martin Luther King Jr. say racial reconciliation should be on Obama's to-do list? What if President Lincoln had taken Dowd's view? Chances are an Obama presidency would still be a dream -- a dream deferred.
Had not Holder -- who used the catchword "cowards" in his speech to his staff last week in discussing Americans' refusal to openly talk about race -- no one would be talking about it today, and Dowd and other white columnists and commentators (and even some black journalists too) would not be offering any comments on the subject.
Just because President Obama is in the White House doesn't mean we should sit back, relax, and say everything is now finally "gonna be alright." Exhibit number one: last week's cartoon in the New York Post in which two white cops shoot to death a chimp and suggest the chimp was the author of the stimulus package. Despite the paper's intent at satire, the image evoked de facto racial overtones and has enraged a swath of the American public by suggesting that Barack Obama was a chimp. Sadly, in many corners across the country, west coast, east coast and in the south, there are still white cops shooting black men -- many of them innocent.Just because Barack Hussein Obama is not of the same cloth of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson Sr. does not mean he should be expected not to continue the dialogue of making us whole. Race and segregation continues, even in 2009, to be the issue we dread talking about. How many blacks were at Dowd's place of worship Sunday morning? How many whites were at Al Sharpton's?
Another famous president from Illinois, and a Republican at that, said it best nearly 151 years ago in Springfield: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." As we celebrate Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday this year, we should honor that statement.
Any one who thinks we can successfully meet the challenges of national security (Iran, Iraq, Middle East peace, a nuclear Pakistan, tribal wars in Africa) or of domestic issues (a tanking economy, and a healthcare system that doesn't get us well), without doing it together -- black and white -- is living in dreamland.
As the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the civil-rights legend who gave the benediction at the president's inauguration, has said: "When America catches the cold, black people get the flu."
Even though many of us cannot wait for the day we truly are "post-racial" in America, we are not past that point yet, and we should not criticize those who are brave enough to remind us.
Rick Blalock, a two-time Emmy-winning journalist and author, is a native of Highland Park, Michigan and lives in Georgia.
Source: The Daily Voice
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