A stinking, rotting corpse …
Death didn’t come soon enough. We saw the teetering, stumbling and falling, but we didn’t notice just how close death’s moment had come. While the verdict is final and certain, many of us ignored the signs.
Racism is dead in America.
And it has been dead for a while now. Like the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s”, we’ve been keeping the corpse around for our own purposes. But it stinks, and it belongs in the garbage.
There was a time when institutional racism was a part of our national fabric, and we paid a heavy price to remove it. Lingering institutional racism lasted 100 years, but was finally killed by brave men and women, blacks and whites, who fought peacefully for change.
But some cling to the corpse, and say that community based racism still exists, where a de-facto standard is as strong as any Jim Crow law.
But I knew community based racism had died when James Byrd Jr.’s killer was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in the deep south town of Jasper, Texas in 1999. Judged by a jury comprised of 11 whites and one black, community-based racism was dead, really dead, completely and absolutely dead.
Tonight, the majority party in the United States nominated a black man to be the party’s nominee, by acclimation, from a majority white crowd. From the start, his campaign was different from the ones by black activists (Shirley Chisholm, Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Jesse Jackson, and the most recently Al Sharpton), or black members of the religious right (Alan Keyes). None of them had a chance. He promised to be “post-racial”, and it was a serious campaign. You cannot be “post” something unless that something is past.
And past it is. Racism is dead in America.
