21st Century Complacency

Ok. Maybe I'm too old fashioned. I grew up during the Civil Rights Era. So many of my memories are studded with the fight for equality and justice. As a child I ate dinner while I watched African American youth hosed by firefighters, beaten by cops, and bitten by police dogs simply because they wanted the right to vote and have a decent education. 

My first date alone with a boy was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember we came out of the movies and looked up at the ticker in Times Square. So many people had just stopped moving, stunned into immobility. We were scared and quiet the entire trip home. Then I went to a rally on 125th Street to see what we could do to politically move against this blatant act of racism. On the way back home, the less politically astute brothers and sisters chose to show their frustration by looting and burning, causing me to run more than walk the entire way home. I still remember my mother's disgust with the way things were going, and her admonition to me to not join in on the thuggery and violence.

On the way to my high school prom, this same boyfriend and I stopped off at St Patrick's Cathedral to pay our respects to Robert Kennedy who had been gunned down while giving a speech. So many milestones in my life are marked by instances of racism, bigotry, and outright slaughter.

Fast forward 40 years and another instance of racism rears its ugly head. Paula Dean, a TV cooking host, is being sued for calling her staff the "N" word, making them use the servants' entrance into her restaurants, and just like in the old days, using separate toilets. Worse still, she doesn't deny it and sees nothing wrong with it.

All of this I can understand. I don't condone it, but I do understand it. A racist is comfortable with being that way, especially when there is no one to challenge their faulty thinking. The last 24 hours have proved her right. 

Did young African American youth jump up and shout down her statements? No. Did they send emails to the Food Network and demand her firing? No. Did they march and picket at her restaurants demanding an apology? No. So what did they do? They Tweeted. 

All day long young people voiced their dissension by tweeting jokes with racist food dish names like "coon bread and Okra Winfrey" and "We Shall Over Crumb Cake". While all of it was in jest, and their way of laughing at her poor taste, at the end of the day, what have they accomplished? Not a thing.

Then I think back to Emmett Till who was savagely beaten, gutted, and murdered for smiling at a white woman in the 60's. Today his sacrifice was reduced to "Emmett Tilapia" and a laugh. I have to ask myself if the thousands of people who were beaten, tortured, lynched, and otherwise abused was worth the justification of the laughs people got at Paula Dean's expense. And you know what? I have to say both "yes" and "no".

A "yes" is because even though I do not like it, we have reached a point in history where most young people can afford to see the humor in racism. The "no" is because we have become so complacent that we are not incensed by her remarks. 

We have made some strides and advances since the 60's. We can go to the college of our choice, we can vote, and if we can afford it, we can live where we choose. But we are still locked into segregated communities, we still experience overwhelming poverty, as a whole, we make less than our white counterparts for doing the same job, and our children still can't read.  The only thing that has changed really is that now we've been brainwashed into believing that this is what we want.