Given that each of us is a combination of many characteristics, why is it necessary to make such an ostentatious show of not seeing one: race? The unavoidable answer is race isn't perceived like other characteristics.
Rather, it's one that makes some people nervous. For them, it's That Which Must Be Overcome. Where I see ancestry, challenge and pride, they see something onerous and burdensome. Where I see one of the things that makes me whole, they see something that polite people should ignore and I should work to transcend.
I can appreciate the frustration of white Americans whose only desire where race is concerned is to know what's OK, what's allowed, what behavior will allow them to finally consider themselves enlightened. Frankly, black folks don't always make that easy. Some of us are never too far from outrage. Some of us could find a racial conspiracy in a phone booth.
So maybe if you're white, just ignoring blackness altogether comes to seem like a good idea. But that's naive and faintly insulting. How do you foster equality by making an essential piece of who I am vanish?
Decent people should seek balance instead -- to make race neither smaller than it is nor larger. Because race is neither a defining facet, nor a demeaning facet, of individual identity. It's a facet, period. Unfortunately, much of what passes for racial dialogue in this country is the chatter of two extremes: the Afrocentric-to-the-point-of-paranoia one that says race matters always, and the ''colorblind'' one that says it matters never.
That's a false dichotomy. Race matters when it matters, and it doesn't when it doesn't.
Dont judged me by my race .''
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Saturday, April 27th 2013 at 2:41PM
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