Responding to a previous post titled “Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop,” a friend asked me: “Why do you like to discuss race? I’m curious about that more so than the race issues themselves—what’s your own background anyway?”
Here is my response. Before you read it, you should know that i hereby acknowledge that a) i am white, b) i have been white my entire life, and c) i still carry a LOT of naivete around the subject of racism and oppression. That said, i think there are obviously a tremendous amount of cultural taboos that continue to cloud this subject, and i have always been a fan of trying to look at those spaces between us where most spend a lavish amount of time and energy trying not to see. I have largely grown up in the cultural vacuum of identity politics, in which you are not allowed to say anything about anyone else’s experience, culturally or personally, other than your own—and so i feel like i am sitting on the end of a particularly wobbly branch, completely unsure if the winds will knock me off. But i guess this is an effort to cut through my own fear of personal expression, and probe a bit deeper into the sensitive wounds that continue to exist beneath our cultural scabs. Read the rest of this entry
There is much talk in America these days around the issue of race. With Barack Hussein Obama as the elected President of the United States, we have begun to collectively reflect upon our relationship with race and racism—and the conversation seems to have polarized into two radically different positions. On one hand, Obama’s viability as a presidential candidate across a wide range of demographics prompts liberals to proudly declare that, finally, we live in a “post-racial” America, no longer tethered to the racial divisiveness that has infected our political systems since the country’s inception. On the other hand, a great number of people are still asking the question “are we ready for a black president?,” which itself seems to indicate that a genuine “post-racial” America is still on the horizon of human evolution. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between, or beyond, these two extremes—we have certainly made some tremendous strides in our collective attitudes toward race and racism, but we cannot confuse our accomplishments with outright victory. There can be no singular victory over racism, but like peace itself, it is a victory that must be won again and again, perpetually into the future.