Yesterday, the US House of Representatives finally issued a formal apology to black Americans for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors due to slavery and Jim Crow laws. Congress has formally apologized in the past to Japanese-Americans for their World War II internment, to native Hawaiians for overthrowing the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, and the Senate apologized in 2005 for failing to pass anti-lynching laws. While five states have issued apologizes for slavery before, Congress had failed to do so previously, in part due to fears that such an apology would lead to demands for reparations from the black community. Congressman Steve Cohen, a white Senator from a Memphis, TN district with a 60 percent black constituency, introduced this resolution in early 2007.
While I suppose such apologies are nice gestures, and in themselves there is nothing wrong with such things, I frankly just don't understand the point. We're all aware of this country's tumultuous past and the race-based strife that have run like earthquake fault lines through the heart of this country. But it's also a painful truth that we are still suffering from the effects of that past, and that as much as things have changed for the better, in far too many ways things have failed to change. CNN's recent series of specials entitled Black in America explored the many hardships that continue to haunt black Americans, and with Senator Barack Obama being the first African American with a very real chance at becoming President of the United States, issues of race have been brought to the forefront and have once again exposed the ugly vein of racism still running just beneath the surface of our society.
What I fail to understand is how an apology for a past wrong, all the perpetrators of which are long dead and gone on to whatever awaited them "on the other side," in any way makes up for, resolves, or moves us forward on a problem that is very much still a problem to this day. Yes, our laws are no longer blatantly biased to exclude people of color from full citizenship in this country, but the underlying attitudes that led to such laws in the first place are still there, like a smoldering and persistent flame within the aftermath of a house fire. We are fooling ourselves if we cannot see how much better things are for black people today, but we are also in a state of denial if we don't see that things are still bad in a number of ways.
How does this apology from Congress address social, economic, and financial issues that hit the black community much harder than they do whites? Does it in anyway explain why it took so long to get help to the predominantly black communities in New Orleans after the devastation of hurricane Katrina, or get employers to finally look at black applicants for open position as equal contenders to their white counterparts? There are times when the old adage "Actions speak louder than words" ring particularly loud and true, and I feel that this is one of those times. I wonder if it was ever considered whether taxpayer dollars might be better spent actually confronting and combating the racial issues still plaguing this country today rather than apologizing for the origins of these problems of the past. Because to me at least, apologizing for making me sit in the back of the bus in the past means little when in many ways I am still being ostracized for the petty minutia that is the color of my skin. While I have no doubts that Sen. Cohen had good intentions, I can't help but believe that the House only passed this resolution in an attempt to apply the "Band Aid over a gunshot wound" approach to the problem as I like to call it, meaning that if we use superficial means to cover up the problem, maybe we'll all forget about it and it'll magically go away.
As nice as it would be to live in this magical land where we could merely wish our problems away, the truth is that until we truly stand up and confront these problems head on without fear of getting our hands dirty in the process, then these problems will continue to fester until once again they blow up and tear this country apart. But hey, at least we now have it on record that one half of Congress is sorry (Which means what, that the Senate is still cool with the whole slavery thing?). And that's at least worth the value of the US dollar today, and that is equal to just over 10 pesos. Cool...
I feel so much better now. Don't you?
- GBB
According to the Skin I’m In
The color of a person's skin, when thought of from a purely objective and logical viewpoint, is the most superficial aspects of humanity. While some things can be guessed about a person's heritage based upon skin color, such as whether or not someone has African, Native American, or Middle Eastern blood flowing through their veins, it tells nothing about one's upbringing, one's intelligence, one's education, one's social or economic standing, one's occupation, or moral code. And yet people have been enslaved, judged, and murdered merely based on the fact that they were unfortunate enough to be blessed with more melanin than their paler counterparts.
The subject of race has been, for whatever reason, a recurring theme swirling around me this week, as if begging me to dive into it head on. On one mailing list I belong to, we've been discussing how race affects the Science Fiction and Fantasy areas of the publishing industry. It is an uphill battle for Black authors to get SF books published with predominantly Black characters, and if they do, they are unilaterally relegated to the African American section of bookstores, as if the stories an author of color tells would only be interesting to people of the same flesh tone.
Also, the ongoing stream of garbage being flung at Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is getting to a point where it's so offensive that it borders on absurd. From the recent cover of The New Yorker depicting Senator Obama as a Muslim giving his militaristic-clad wife a fist bump, to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, of all people, making the ridiculous accusation during a commercial break of a Fox Network interview that Obama was "talking down" to Black people and his wanting to "cut his nuts off" for it, it's evident that even within the community of those with never-fading tans, that skin color is a barrier to acceptance and understanding among us all.
I could go on ad nauseum about my theories on where this comes from. I do believe that the ideals of self worth, or the need to lift up one's own feeling of self worth by finding ways to devalue others, is a major part of it. But I'm sure that is far too simplistic to be the sole cause for such a mutual and widespread societal plague. And although we can so dispassionately judge each other for such superficial reasons, the topic itself is so personal that even the attempt to discuss it evokes controversy and ire.
Although I in my fiction I don't write to deliver messages or forward particular agendas, I do deal with "life-issues" such as race and racism. For example, in my short story collection Phoenix Tales: Stories of Death & Life, there is a story entitled "A Tale of Black and White" in which two old men return to the scene of a horrible incident that took place 60 years ago, in which Jesse Black (a White man), took part in the lynching of the son of his companion, Amos White (who happens to be a Black man) after his relationship with Black's daughter results in her death. The irony of the story, and I think the heart of it as well, is that these two men have a deeply rooted hatred toward one another that neither has, nor will ever, get beyond. And yet because of their mutual tragedy they share a bond so strong that it soon becomes obvious that all they have left to cling to in this life is each other.
I don't understand how one human being can look at another and so easily distance themselves from that person that they literally dehumanize them in their minds. How can the cries of a person being chained, whipped, or hung from a tree not resonate in the soul of the one responsible and remind him of his own family and the horrific devastation such an act to their own loved ones would inflict upon them? Why is it that it merely takes the different color of a human's flesh to cause one human being to view another as something both alien and of lesser worth? Just the very thought that we humans have the capacity to do such things saddens and frightens me, and at the end of the day, there is no horror I could write that is more terrifying than those that people inflict upon one another on a daily basis, and it's probably why human nature is usually at the core of all of my stories in some shape or form. To paraphrase the question asked by Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View this morning when discussing the revelation that Reverend Jesse Jackson used the word "nigger" during the same interview mentioned above:
When are we going to get past this racial divide and move on to more important things that affect all of us?
I think the below words from the song "Skin I'm In" by the group Cameo best describe how I feel (Lyrics taken from sing365.com):
It's the world who's out to see
Basic respect humanity
I'm just trying to be for real in a world with less appeal
I'm so frustrated and flustered
At what has been reduced to justice
It is immoral or a sin
If it is according to the skin I'm in
Skin I'm in
- GBB
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