It’s Always About Race
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 9, 2010
This won't be a popular statement to the majority of people in the United States, but it's not supposed to be. Folks, it's always about race; plain and simple.
Now, why am I making such a statement? What's prompting this particular post and how does it pertain to what's going on in this country?
If you go search Google for the phrase "it's not always about race", you'll find a bunch of entries. Every entry you find was written by someone who's not a person of color. If one needed any more proof that it's always about race, that shows it.
What's the issue? People feel that because it's 2010 that they can say anything they want to about or to people of color. Quite often, those words either smack of a racist tone or are interpreted in that fashion. There seems to be this forgetting of history and what some people have gone through in the very recent past. I'm 50 years old, and though I missed the worst part of the civil rights movement, I've still had to deal with some interesting statements made to me about race. And I've always gotten either "I don't mean you" or "nothing personal" or some iteration of those two phrases.
The Tea Party people have been quite inflammatory towards President Obama. Some of them claim they had similar hatred of President Bush, but no one got together to create their version of a movement. The Tea Party representatives keep saying they're not racist, that race has nothing to do with it, and that they're a party of inclusion. The latest Gallup Poll shows that the party of inclusion, which has had many documented racist events, shows that this group is 79% white and only 6% black. It's also 57% Republican and 50% of them are 50 years old or older.
Don't want to talk politics? Let's talk business. Out of the entire Fortune 500, there are only 5 minority CEOs; four black men and one black woman. Big business isn't exactly the paragon of racial diversity, and that trickles down into most of the other businesses in the country. Health care, which is one of my fields, fields less than 5% of minority CEOs as of 2009, and less than 40% of hospital employees nationwide. Even hospitals in predominantly black areas rarely have minority CEOs and have problems reaching 50% as far as the employees within. Every hospital I've been to, when I've brought it up, says they have great affirmative action programs; the numbers never support it.
I apologize to the rest of the world that writes about this topic, but you're totally wrong. It's always about race, and the more you deny it, the more you prove it.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy, was once asked if the other admirals hated him because he was Jewish. He responded that no, there were so many other reasons for the other admirals to hat him that being Jewish really didn’t figure into it.
Same thing with Obama. He’s been such a complete doofus as President that his being half-black really doesn’t matter.
Tom, you having to say “half black” proves my point.
But since your post was titled “It’s Always About Race”, it really wouldn’t have made any sense to refer to Obama as half-white.
You mentioned his race period. That plus you negated everything else I wrote on and only went after Obama. Course, that’s the conservative in you, I know. lol
You didn’t need correction on anything else! 🙂
Heck, I wasn’t corrected on that one either.
I agree it is always about race but only because people make it that way. Nobody talked about Obama being the best man for the job they talked about him being the first African American president. It is a sad statement but I suspect that most of the people who voted FOR him and against him voted on the basis of race, how can the guy succeed with that lead up?
We talk about Supreme Court nominees being Hispanic (Sonya Sotomayor) or Women (Elena Kagan) but we seldom talk about them being the best for the job.
We talk Religion the same way. President Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic president and Mitt Romney certainly lost the Republican nomination because he is Mormon.
I am here in Memphis, TN where one of the politicians is running on the slogan “Only One”. He says that it means he should be the “only one black man from Tennessee elected to Congress”.
Frankly, I am sick of the talk of religion, sex and race being any part of the decision process at any level to decide who is the best person to do a job. We have a laws to prevent discrimination and I think these laws should prevent politicians from using these same factors to promote themselves as well.
Let’s stop talking about all these characteristics which are meaningless when it comes to getting the job done and let’s focus on who is the best qualified person.
One final thought, as a self professed geek and nerd I am partial to these characteristics and everyone knows that geeks rule the world 🙂
Great comment Keith, and I fully agree with you. There’s so many “isms” that the world ends up having to deal with that it’s hard for any of us to be considered as just people. The problem I see, however, is that people do things in the name of race or sex or something else that’s against someone rather than for everyone, and when that happens, it has to be called out. I know I’m not going to see the day when it doesn’t matter, but I can be hopeful for the future.
Since the beginning of time people with small minds have sought to hide their acts of cowardliness, greed, jealousy and selfishness behind religion, race and sex and that will never change as long as humans inhabit this third rock from the sun. In fact there is a great quote from Charles Darwin that I think sums it up:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Hmmm… I’ll let Darwin have his day, but I know I wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for making the decisions as to who got to live or not live based on that criteria. True, I might think about it for a bit, but in the long run I wouldn’t want the job.