The fact that historically oppressed people - particularly Black and Native Americans - are now ascending to certain political posts for the first time in American history says all you need to know about the current state of race relations in this country. That is: 1) it is very good that we are finally expanding our political diversity, and 2) it is a stunning indictment of us that we are STILL expanding our political diversity, inch by begrudging inch.
Alabama and Mississippi celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert E. Lee on the same day - today. Sort of like inviting John Wayne Gacy to a Boy Scout brunch. I used to think that Confederates were all those raggedy decrepit old nose-pickers with their bellies sticking out from under their flannel shirts and skinny women with patchy hair, missing teeth and shrill voices, all carrying Confederate flags and guns of various sort, usually about 7 of them showing up to protest whatever. Tip of the iceberg, as it turns out.
That Southerners still celebrate their treasonous past, their racist history and their happy plantation fantasies is not as uncommon as I once thought. Actually, like many people my age, I see-sawed back and forth on the matter. When I was young I watched the race wars on TV and was terrified; the South seemed like some evil country where the powerful put innocents up for sacrifice. As I got older I began to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle ways racism was practiced in the North, and began to understand the structural nature of the beast. In the meantime the South settled down and I started to believe that King's dream of overcoming was a real possibility. It peaked with the election of Barack Obama.
It's been all downhill since. I don't need to review the evidence. I don't like living in the South, but only marginally less than I like living anywhere in the USA. I'd go back to where I came from but I'm not sure where that is. My family has been in this country since sometime in the 1700s. So far, it just hasn't really worked out as we might have hoped.
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