A couple stories in the news recently have once again shown that racism is alive and well in the good ol' US of A. The first involved a prominent member of the RRR (radical religious right) who has run for the office of president several times. The second involved a bus driver in Coushatta, Louisiana. The third involved the recent Congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act. The first makes me angrier because this bigot has such a huge platform to speak from. The second I consider the most damaging and the scariest because it appears to demonstrates not chosen bigotry but an "inherent" mind set that shows that despite fifty years of fighting for equality, we haven't come all that far. But the third deeply saddens and troubles me by virtue of its very existence.The first story involved Pat Buchanan. While doing an interview on the Hannity and Colmes show promoting his latest book, Pat made the following statement:
"What I would like is— I'd like the country I grew up in. It was a good country. I lived in Washington, D.C., 400,000 black folks, 400,000 white folks, in a country 89 or 90 percent white. I like that country."
This isn't the first time Buchanan has made remarks that are overtly or covertly racist. He supported statements made by Samuel Francis, a former nationally syndicated columnist who was fired for his suggestion that whites were genetically superior to minorities. Buchanan has also been called to task about his anti-semitism. Buchanan wrote in 1983 that women were not endowed by nature to succeed in the business world and claimed that the real "liberators" of women were "the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer." Nor is this the only outrageous inference Buchanan has made. In May, 2004, Buchanan wrote an article titled A Time for Truth". In part, he wrote:
It is a time for truth. In any guerrilla war we fight, there is going to be a steady stream of U.S. dead and wounded. There is going to be collateral damage – i.e., women and children slain and maimed. There will be prisoners abused. And inevitably, there will be outrages by U.S. troops enraged at the killing of comrades and the jeering of hostile populations. If you would have an empire, this goes with the territory. And if you are unprepared to pay the price, give it up.
The administration's shock and paralysis at publication of the S&M photos from Abu Ghraib tell us we are not up to it. For what is taking place in Iraq is child's play compared to what we did in the Philippines a century ago. Only there, they did not have digital cameras, videocams and the Internet."
Buchanan's essentially saying that we just have to accept that these kinds of things are going to happen. He's not protesting the attempts of the US to build an empire. In fact, his words seem to support assertions that the US is empire building. His regret seems to be that this misadministration isn't able to "spin" things like Abu Ghraib into something necessary to protect Americans. There's no outrage expressed at what happened at Abu Ghraib. It seems there's more disappointment that we got caught because of technological advances.
Why is anyone still listening to or soliciting the opinion of, much less giving such wide publicity to, someone like Pat Buchanan?
When I read the second story to my wife, she asked "Are you serious? This is 2006!" It seems a bus driver in Shreveport, Louisianna felt it was acceptable to order nine black children to move to the back of the school bus because the front seats were reserved for the white students. When parents complained, the bus driver was told to make a seating chart and she assigned all nine black children to the back two seats of the bus. Nine children in two seats! That's not only unsafe, it's illegal not only on the segregation issue but also in terms of how many students are allowed per seat in a school bus.
I realize there will always be people who hold racist views. It's a statistical certainty. But how does someone with such blatant racist views get past the screening process that school employees (or anyone coming in contact with school students) must go through? The scariest thing to me is that from the seating chart she came up with, she either doesn't understand why her actions were wrong or, more frightening, she doesn't care that they're wrong because she truly believes that blacks are inferior to whites and is actively working to spread her message. This story highlights the resurgence of open and blatant racial discrimination that's taking place in this nation.
And finally, the story that saddened me so deeply. The Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965 to counter the discriminatory "Jim Crow" laws that kept a large portion of blacks away from the voting booths. The Voting Rights Act sought to provide protection of the right of all US citizens over the age of 18 to vote. Despite an attempt by some Republican members of Congress to derail the renewal of that important piece of legislation, the Voting Rights Act was renewed and signed into law on July 27, 2006.
So what saddens me about the renewal of this act? The mere fact that we need such a law in the first place. That we didn't make it permanent with this latest vote. That in 25 more years, another generation of minorities is going to be wondering if they're going to lose their right to vote. That we have elected members of Congress saying that the law is no longer necessary. And yet we still have people like Buchanan and the school bus driver from Shreveport who are proving that yes, it still is very necessary. (That's not even getting into the issues of (mainly black and/or democrat) voter disenfranchisement during the last two presidential elections.)
Racism is alive and well in the US. Anyone who says that racism no longer exists in America is a liar. Anyone who says that racism is no longer a problem in America has his/her vision limited by all the sand in his/her eyes. Anyone who seeks to marginalize or minimize the effects of racism in America needs to be closely watched, especially if s/he is someone in charge of setting or making recommendations about public policy or legislation.
No act of racism should be glossed over with "Oh, it's only one incident." As corny and trite as it sounds, it only takes one spark to start a raging inferno. One act overlooked and unpunished will give anyone viewing or hearing about that act the impression that it's something acceptable. If only one person acts on that belief, it's one person too many. As Thomas Jefferson so succinctly put it, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
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