Dealing With Race, Somehow

MENTION THE WORD "RACISM', and the variety of reactions is enormous. Some folks insist that racism once existed, but no longr does, and that we should all jsut stop worrying about it, and it will go away, because it isn't there in the first place. Stranged as that is, perhpas the strangest people are the racists themselves, people who, surrounded by millions of human beings all with billions of unique, individual personal characteristices, can't seemt o simply accept the reality that every person has a unique, individual color skin, if you look closely enough, and that, in the grand scheme of things the precise pigment of someone's skin is, well, rather...trivial. We just can't seem to get there, to racelessness. we seem to have given up on our old stragety of "color blindness", because it forces us to pretend to be unaware of something which not only exists, but exists rather blatantly. Somehow, there is something disingenuine about being "color blind" racially. We tried, long ago, "black is beautiful"; that too seemed somehow patronizing, artficial. Many of the people who are actually willing to acknowledge that racism is still very much with us are resigned to its seeming inevitability. I have heard them say things like: "Racism has always been part of human culture, and it always will be." This isn't true either. IN faxct, there is not the slightest indication of racism existng in human culture before the middle of the fifteenth century, when Europeans used the dark skin of Africans to justify reducing them to slavery. The European enslavement of Africans, first practiced by the fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish explorers, precipitated racism, our modern folly. There is no document in any library or collection in the world yet discovered which, before the fifteenth century, makes reference to "race" as a human condition. To give credit where it is due, considering that it took human civilization thousands of years of non-racist life to even invent something as bizarre as racism; once we got started, we certainly made up for, and continue to make up for, lost time. White supremacy is indeed as old as the United States, which was founded upon racist ideology, but over the past several decades has has reared its increasingly large head. Our modern version of white supremacy, its birth and growth, has parallelled the racial equaily civil rights movement, enogh so to be justly considered a reaction to civil rights, or, as we say these days, a "pushback". Racism post world War Two emerged as an adjunct to conservatism in general, as a fringe extremest movment, but, since the Obama presidency and the Trump movement, has become much more mainstream. Many of our regular American mass murders, including the most recent one, were motivated by racial hatred, white supremacy. The continued influx of immigrants to the U.S. from countries in which most people have brown or black skin fuels the fire; it got Trump elected. Our most modern, far right incarnation of racist ideology has a fancy sounding name, as many idiotic ideals often do. "Replacement Theory" fits in quite well with our current culture of conspiracy theories. According to this nonsensical approach, there is a deep, dark, hidden conspiracy on the part of somebody or other to eliminate "white" people, and to "replace" them with dark skinned models. In Trump's bizarre worldview, the Mexicans are "sending", as if by highoy organized endeavor, rapists and murderers to the United States. Furthermore, let us not forget Trump's description of African countries as "shit hole" countries, and his expressed preference that future immigrants come from Norway. Frist, you elect a black president. That in itself is enough to bring the good ole white boys out of the wood work. The result? A racist president, 2017-2021. We're still reconvering from that. Maybe someday we will.