To get a reading of where we might be with discourse on race, consider this excerpt from Dave Kvidahl’s commentary in last week’s University News:
“Because one man’s body produces more melanin than another does that make him less than human? Does his darker skin allow him to be put into bonds and become property? In America the answer was and is yes.”
The protest which that “is” should have provoked never happened, which means students either did not read Kvidahl’s article, or they did read it and thought it superb satire. But for simply pedagogical purposes, and because a folly like that article deserves to be exploited, here is a small scoop of what that “is” denies: the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In short, the inclusion of “is” implies that the development of history, regarded by most mortals as unstoppable, did in fact stop, never to resume again.
Slavery, Kvidahl, asserts is still here.
In my way, Kvidahl’s commentary was a mistake. But learned people handle mistakes with great care: in each there is a precious lesson that, if learned, can be applied to the future.
That is the gracious lens through which students and other readers should address the inexplicable analytical thinness draping across Kvidahl’s movement of mind. It has, after all, provoked reflection upon race, and because the usual musing about race is weakened by a bogus political correctness, now is an occasion to introduce some common sense.
To do that, allow yourself to marvel at the maturing of America’s commitment to racial justice.
A snapshot of improvement is prominent in government. Three of the most influential members of the Bush cabinet are black: Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Education Rod Paige and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. Republican Congressman J.C. Watts, the fourth-ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives, by the end of the decade probably will be the first African-American to adorn a presidential ticket. And across the street, at the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas may be swearing him in as the first African-American Chief Justice.
Those models of achievement concentrate heavily on politics, but politicians are highly visible. Young black men and women, whether they pursue the presidency or a teaching post, a chairmanship or a bestseller, can graduate from college with justification to dream big. Today young blacks, more than any in previous generations, can be optimistic about the contribution they will make to the world.
Shenika Harris, graduate student and teacher here at Saint Louis University, is young and black, and she is optimistic. “I do think,” said Harris, “that the African-American race is looked upon as an ethnic group that has made important contributions to our culture.” And although change “can’t happen over night,” Harris does think that “things are getting better.”
They are, indeed. So much so that black America has reached a point where the greatest impediment to individual black dignity comes, sadly, from blacks themselves. In a pedigree, for instance, that includes such icons as Miles Davis, the Supremes, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, most of black music now is dominated by the awful output of rap “artists,” performers like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre who put to bass and high decibels their love for drugs and their interpretation of women as “bitches.”
Even the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a man who has been considered, remarkably, a helpful moral voice for the black community, has disappointed: just a short time ago he
Announced that he committed adultery. This may seem to be a minor infraction, but with the black community overwhelmed by babies born out of wedlock, the symbolism of Jesse Jackson’s lapse in judgment is woefully counterproductive.
But despite the self-inflicted wounds of Jackson and other black Americans, and despite the racism that still too often taints the thought of many whites (think of racial profiling, for one example), racial relations in America are better now than an at any other time in American history.
Sadly, that fact is widely unappreciated. Many only want to dwell on the bad, on what has not happened on what did happen or on some other ludicrously impertinent imperfection of human conduct.
But contrived sadness cannot smother the splendid progress in racial relations-a progress that gains momentum every day and that, thankfully, cannot be dismantled by uninformed analysis.
Matt Emerson is a freshman majoring in theology and political science.
