Is racism a problem in America?
Yes. Just take the last six months: first we had Don Imus, a nationally syndicated radio host, degrade the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team; in West Virginia a few months ago, a white family beat and molested their black neighbor until she was found half alive in their shed; the Jena Six; multiple noose displays at the University of Maryland; Bill O’Reilly’s comment on how surprisingly good a black owned restaurant named Sylvia’s was in NYC; and yesterday, a noose was found outside of a professor’s room at Columbia University.
What is going on? Is it just me or does this past year seem to be more filled than usual with hate crime/comments than in years past? The events are not isolated to one section of the country, one class, or one social demographic, but go from the political (O’Reilly) to the educational (the two universities) to the rural (WV, Jena) and even the athletic forum (Imus).
Maybe, like so much, it is just a smaller trend exaggerated by media attention. But it feels like a larger social resurgance.
People are now saying that race is going to be a larger issue than thought in the 2008 election. First there was Barack Obama, who from day one was on the constant defensive about “how black” he really is from both side of the color and political spectrum, and now the candidates are held accountable for how they handle these latest hate crimes in Jena and Columbia University as seen when Jessie Jackson declared Obama and Clinton “too white to deal with black issues.”
Which makes me think—in the past years, we have seen this country become increasingly polarized in terms of politics. It is, I think, one of the biggest problems in our government today. But for the first time I wonder how that dichotomy has affected the rest of our culture and society—could the racial tension be another example of the polarization of this country? Has something happened in the past couple of years to make us regress to a time of “black and white” (both literal and metaphorically)?
I am sort of rambling. I just could not believe it when another noose was a headline of the day. It is a symbol of one of the worst times in our nation’s history and I cannot imagine why it should reemerge as a theme of our time as well. I am not sure why the number of racial crimes has eclipsed years past, but I would hate for this country to be too white or black to deal with the issues that clearly effect us all.
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Yes, this is too bad. Maybe this black-white situation runs in cycles and we are in a particularly bad one. I don’t know–purely speculation.