My dad was born in 1926 in Raymond, Washington. The first black man he remembers seeing wasn’t until the family moved to San Francisco in 1933. Even then, dad attended Catholic school and the black kids attended public school.
Dad fought in the Pacific during World War II…the day after he turned 18, he was at boot camp and less than one year later he was at Iwo Jima. For the two and a half years dad spent over seas in a segregated military, he only saw black men once, and that was while he was in a hospital recovering from an injury. He told me that he never understood why the military was like that. He figured a man was a man.
As I’ve thought about it, the first black person I ever saw wasn’t until I was 10 years old when we moved from the Bay Area to Chicago…and then there were only two or three blacks at school…and they all lived across the railroad tracks. Even as a teenager, growing up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. (in the same school district and years portrayed in the movie Remember the Titans), there were only a handful of black families at our public high school, and they too seemed to all live on one street.
My family is a pretty average family in the American experience and, for us, the color of someone’s skin was never an issue. Like dad said, a man is a man. I know racism exists, but I also know that racism is born out of ignorance and hate – not the American way of life. And this is an important point.
If racism is personal, not systemic, then its politics are driven by preference and not by an innate American injustice. I realize racism can be institutionalized, like my dad experienced in a segregated military. But institutional is not systemic. Institutions can and do change.
Perhaps now that President-elect Obama is about to settle into the White House this notion that America is a racist country will be put to bed. I hope the new President will be a Bill Cosby example and not a Jesse Jackson example – a Reverend King devotee and not a Reverend Wright devotee – in other words, a realist and not an ideologue.
A realist would say that racism exists in America. An ideologue would say that America is a racist country. A realist would say that good individual examples of human decency and dignity will overcome genuine hate and unjustified intolerance. An ideologue would say that personal examples aren’t good enough, our way of life must be forcibly changed.
There is an ideology of race, just as there is an ideology of feminism or gender. I truly believe that our new President is a realist about race despite the whole Reverend Wright thing. But I also believe that our new President is an ideologue – his working paradigm is the oppressed versus the oppressors.
Critics were only partially correct to call Obama a socialist. He is far more than that, at least from what we know of his words. He speaks like an ideologue and, in historical terms, that means he speaks like a Marxist. For a worldview that sees every social problem as the oppressed and oppressor, the fix isn’t a patient and cultivated rise of social consciousness; the fix is the seizure of political power to erase society’s false consciousness. If we Jay-walked through Grant Square on election night, and interviewed his supporters, how many would cry something like this, “Finally, no longer will some groups in society dominate others.”
When we hear that sort of thing we know we’re in the presence of an ideologue. President-elect Obama seems to have avoided the ideology of race, in fact admirably so, but as everyone’s President will he be able to overcome the very spirit and essence of his Marxist idealism? If he can’t, America will only grow more divided.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
