Start Your Engines

I WAS ONCE ASKED whether I am a fan of NASCAR (national association of stock car ardent rumrunners). Give me credit. I didn't take the usual intellectual tact of feigned bemusement at the banality of watching a group of cars going in circles interminably like a flock of cats chasing tails.

Nor did I break out some staid environmental degradation objection. Actually, I like racing, particularly stock car racing, and have for years. But that need not preclude the telling of the truth, and here, it will not.

I did, therefore, point out that with anywhere from one hundred to two hundred thousand prople present per NASCAR spectacular, nary a person of color is to be seen, ever. The stock response to this is, predictably, "Nobody's keeping them out. All they have to do is show up."

The insipidity, the shallow, dishonest stupidity, the blind cruelty of this argument reflects the phenomenon itself. Deeply entrenched, ultra conservatice, thoughtless thinking, transmitted through generations, precluding any substantive progress in cultural attitude or physical fact.

Black people don't show up because they have never been given the slightest reason to think they would be welcome, and not pushed into the far corner of the oval. And this is hardly surprising, considering simple historical and current reality.

Three hundred years of slavery, a hundred years of segregation and Jim Crow, and another forty years of desperate struggle, sometimes peaceful , sometimes violent, and hey boys? You know what, whitey? You wouldn't show up either.

It isn't as if any concerted effort has ever been made to change anything.. Only weak tacit acceptance of a horrendous history of senseless race based brutality, lingering, always lingering...and a weak spined "you can come on in now, son. Sit right over there".

Scan the crowd, scan the cockpit, scan the crew pit. No color. Nothing, other than a pervasive, institutionalized, extant, static culture of systematic exclusion. There's a lot more at work here, boys, a lot more driving this ongoing tragedy, than a mere failure to appear.

Gentlemen, its time to start your engines, the ones in your head, and in your heart.