We Are NOT Post-Racial

by Tony Peterson
R3 Contributor

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Thomas Jefferson penned those words in 1776, and for the rest of his life he wondered whether that equality applied to “the black man” as it did “the white man” and “the Indian.” According to brilliant historian Winthrop Jordan, author of White Man’s Burden, Jefferson, our third U.S. President, struggled with the differences among the races. Specifically, he wrote to the Marquis de Chastellux: I believe the Indian…to be, in body and mind, equal to the white man. I have supposed the black man, in his present state, might not be so…

Jefferson clearly wanted to believe in that equality. But he found difficulty in reconciling the picture of slaves in their servitude with the possibility that they might somehow and someday be equal to free whites and Native Americans.

The President of the United States is a bi-racial man who identifies as black. American slavery ended 150 years ago. Jim Crow laws stopped 50 years ago. The United States is now more multicultural than ever, and we see people of every ethnicity in influential places of government, business, academia, and popular culture. There is no denying the progress. Perhaps it is time to stop talking about race. Is it time to begin to celebrate a post-racial society in the United States?

There are many reasons to stop talking about race in America. We resist mentioning race and ethnicity unless absolutely necessary. Maybe it’s the fear that someone will be called a racist. Maybe it’s the fear that no good can come from race-talk. Maybe it’s the belief that talking only makes things worse. Maybe it’s simply that we have been taught not to talk about race in polite company. So is there any value in talking openly about race?

Some of us will always be aware of the place ethnicity plays in our lives. I am an African American man married to an Anglo woman. We have raised her four Anglo children together, and we now enjoy the love of our nine Anglo grandchildren. It is not surprising that race would be at least an occasional topic of conversation among our family members.

Some other families claim the luxury of rarely, if ever, discussing race. But luxuries come at a cost. We see the cost when certain incidents occur in our societal lives. We can recognize the flashpoints through a collection of code words. Ferguson, OJ, 9-11, Donald Sterling, Immigration, Trayvon, Zimmerman, Fast and Furious, Fort Hood, Beer Summit.

These words refer to incidents that take us by surprise in their racial import. Often the incident itself seems tragic but somehow innocent or irrelevant to us—until we see the polarized responses. That polarization does not necessarily break on racial lines, but it often reveals racial sentiments. Issues that most of us believe were settled come to the surface. And our dreams of post racialism seem to be simply dreams from a deep sleep. We wake to the reality: We do not live in a post-racial society. And all of our ethnicity issues are not over.

Some would suggest that we should stop mentioning race altogether and that anyone who mentions it only aggravates the problem. Theses code words and their referenced incidents should warn us otherwise. But we hope or pretend that these things do not matter. Whatever the reason, race is one of those topics most of us refuse to discuss openly.

But many of us dare to invoke race when we believe we are in the midst of people like us, whether they be people who look like us or people we believe think like us. And we do so with potential danger. So with that potential danger, should we talk about race at all?