This has been quite a year in terms of racially charged conversations and situations. From Paula Deen being exposed as an “N-word” spouting, old fashioned bigot to the awful injustice that was the Zimmerman verdict to Oprah airing the dreadful Bill Duke film, “Dark Girls” (soon to be idiotically followed up by “Light Girls”) to the demented Don Sterling spouting his hate speech to his beard mistress to two historic African-American films “The Butler” and “12 Years A Slave” at the Oscars to Eric Garner and Michael Brown being murdered by police in NY and Ferguson, Missouri, respectively – the subject of race in America has been on everyone lips all year long.
A recent Gallup poll concerns me, as it seems that we are still a nation greatly divided. While 69% percentage of African-Americans feel the daily sting of American racism, most White Americans – a full 68% – seem to think that racism is no longer an issue and that they have no more work to do! This is very scary and reflects a society truly in denial about both its history and its present and thus assuring itself a racist future!
Since I work in an industry – the media – in which racism is built into the very foundation, its effects are something that I have to spiritually cleanse from almost daily. The funny thing is that people have thought I am everything from Latina to Arabic to Japanese to Filipino. So when I am racially discriminated against, I can never tell which people the perpetrators are prejudiced against! This has led me to be somewhat bemused at the ignorance that racial prejudice represents. I know that if this is happening to me, it is definitely happening to other people. Most racists don’t even know what the ethnic background of the people they are discriminating against actually is! Hell, half the time they don’t even know their OWN real backgrounds!
Today’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Had A Dream” speech from the 1963 March On Washington, had me pondering the whole issue. How far have we actually come? And will we ever get all the way there?
#MLK #IHadADreamSpeech #MarchOnWashington
