(NNPA)—Now, in the season that’s supposed to exalt goodwill toward all, comes fresh evidence of the important role the White majority’s unwillingness to consider Black Americans as their counterparts across the color line plays in maintaining the racial divide.
Note that I said the White majority, not all Whites. Indeed, at each stage of Blacks’ difficult journey through and out of the eras of slavery and its first cousin, Jim Crow, the alliance between Blacks and the minority of Whites who’ve opted to support racial justice has been critical to the progress blacks charted.
The current dense fog of racial controversy enveloping American society shouldn’t blind us to the fact that that dynamic still works: For one thing, it’s precisely because a sizable minority of White voters joined with the heavy majorities of Black, Hispanic- and Asian-American voters that Barack Obama was elected and re-elected to the presidency. (And the protests against the grand jury decisions in the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner continue to include significant numbers of White and other Americans of color.)
But the Obama breakthrough has also led many of the nation’s diminishing White majority to cling ever more tightly to both obvious and disguised White-supremacist notions of its racial world of fantasy, to blind themselves to reality.
About Post Author
