America's New Racial Reality: The Daily Beast

Quoted via The Daily Beast:

So let’s get this straight. Henry Louis Gates denounces a Cambridge police officer in Gates’ own living room. President Obama, referring to the Gates incident, says the Cambridge police acted “stupidly.” Two black kids beat up a white kid on an Illinois school bus this week for unclear reasons, and in a flash Matt Drudge makes it a national story. Rush Limbaugh cites the incident as out of “Obama’s America,” where “white kids get beat up with the black kids cheering.” Maureen Dowd suggests that Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst at President Obama may have been partly ignited by race, with the epithet “Boy” hanging in the air as an unspoken suffix. No sooner is Dowd slapped down than former President Jimmy Carter weighs in to say, yes, Wilson’s outburst was “based on racism.”

“Is your baby racist?” a recent Newsweek cover asks, a question that suggests how deeply unsettled we are. America properly took the election of Barack Obama to the presidency as a threshold moment, but it seems many people assumed there would be no crossing of that threshold into the next room. Wrong. The news, from Joe Wilson to Jimmy Carter, is telling us what the next room looks like.

Long ago, during slavery, it was required that owned Negroes never display unhappiness with their condition. Here is the testimony of the former slave John Little: “They say slaves are happy because they laugh and are merry. I myself, and three or four others, have received 200 lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken; that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it—must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself—I have cut capers in chains.” more