A few years ago I floated the notion that the Obama administration could lead to the end of racism in the US. Not because he’d herald an era of color-blind wonderment, but because the race-baiters would get so exercised that they’d use the term too much and turn it into a “cry wolf” that people would just ignore… thus letting rationality finally enter into the debate on the issue.
A few years on and… wow. Things are getting pretty bad on the “rational debate on race” front. Witness Derbyshires article… and the response to it. witness the non-racist Trayvon/Zimmerman incident, and how it’s been exploded into a racist incident by those looking to exploit it. Witness the blatant, easy racism that turns not only into violence but violence that people enact with a party attitude.
At any point in history, people can look around them and say “boy, things suck. Society must be about to fall!” But right now… boy, things sure suck in the area of race relations. It sure *seems* to be noticeably worse than it was not so many years ago. An honest discussion of the concept remains an impossibility; any attempt to do so gets a person branded a “racist,” which remains Kryptonite to any sort of success. I’m left to wonder what things might be like in another four years.