I'm very conservative and have never voted for a Democrat for president. But all of a sudden, I didn't vote for Obama because he's black. I never saw pictures of Clinton or Bush for sale in a department store, but now, when I see pictures of Obama and express my disbelief while rolling my eyes, my friends shush me and motion toward a nearby black person. Good grief. It's not like I'm saying, "Can you believe they have pictures of a black man on sale?" Hey, ten years ago they could have had tons of pictures of Barack Obama on sale, and I wouldn't have paid a bit of attention. Well, other than to wonder who this person was whose picture was apparently worth buying.
Why wasn't Kanye West accused of racism? He jumped up on stage, took the microphone from a white girl, and then praised a black girl. Why wasn't that racist? Instead of calling him a racist, people rightly called him a moron. (Well, that's not the word most people use, but I don't use words like "jackass.") So why is Joe Wilson a racist instead of a
The hypocrisy of this whole racism thing kills me. I remember during the election, on "The View," Elisabeth Hasslebeck asked why race should matter, why it shouldn't be just the person's views, record, experience, etc. Whoopi Goldberg told her that that was a white person's point of view, that Elisabeth, as a white woman, couldn't understand what it felt like for her, as a black woman, to be able to have a black president. That would have been fine and dandy if it weren't for my suspicion that Whoopi wouldn't have been singing that tune if Alan Keyes had become president. A black president proclaiming that sex outside of marriage is wrong, that homosexuality is wrong, that abortion is wrong--somehow, I don't see people like Whoopi Goldberg jumping for joy because Alan Keyes, a black man, had become president.There's a large percentage of black students that attend the college in Georgia where I teach. A couple of them I had several years ago got bent out of shape because I said something about Black English. I informed them that I hadn't coined the term, that it referred to a particular dialect of English, and I essentially used my linguistic terminology to diffuse the situation. But lately, I've had a number of black students who've been raised to believe that no one is treating them a particular way because of the color of their skin. These kids don't have a chip on their shoulder, and we can carry on conversations about race and dialects and black vs. white hair and anything else. I walked in on an argument once in which some of the white males were saying that white people don't riot. That was an absurd statement, of course, but the three black girls were reasoning with them (no mean feat) rather than taking their ludicrous remarks as a personal affront. In my linguistics class this semester, one girl said that when she moved from Texas to Washington as a child, she got stomachaches when she went to school because all the kids made fun of her accent, and it upset her tremendously. I moved from Georgia to Wisconsin as an adult with an M.A. in Hispanic linguistics, and when people would say things like "It's 'pen,' not 'pin'" (in the South, those words are pronounced the same way), I would respond, "Lower mid front vowels don't precede nasals in the southern dialect." That always shut them up, of course, since no one had a clue what I'd said. But the point is that I was intelligent and educated, and I had no reason to feel inferior to anyone. Many of my black students are experiencing that now. They're intelligent, they're educated, and they don't have any reason to feel inferior to anyone. Because they don't feel inferior, they don't make assumptions that someone has treated them a particular way because of the color of their skin. And isn't that better for them and their attitude and self image even if there are some jac morons who do treat them a certain way because of the color of their skin?
