Can we end it?
It’s now late 2008; I just heard a news blurb on radio WQXR in New York City: it said that Senator Barack Obama faces a major obstacle in his race for the presidency – a recent poll reveals that ‘40% of whites harbor negative views of Blacks.’
Aside from a pall settling over my mind which echoed “So what else is new?” – I felt a surge of irritation and frustration at this reminder of the country’s insane epidemic of untreated racism/colorism .
As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. so poignantly described it, “…judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin…” should be our modus operandi but, time after time, in all of its malevolence, what do we people of color experience n every arena of people activity? – overt and covert untreated racism - (we at www.racismtest.org more accurately call it colorism).
Oh dear, where does all of this come from? Well, one analytic look at the (mis) Education system hereabouts reveals that they’re still teaching eurocentric history – ‘the cradle of civilization was in Europe – Greece,’ instead of Black Africa – and failing to teach its students who their true ancestors were: Black folk in Black Africa. (All huemans are ‘of Black African descent!) And yet the system disingenuously claims to be ‘truthcentric!’ (term coined by the eminent Black Guyanese Historian, Professor Ivan Van Sertima)
In the face of such mass (mis)education and its denigration- (hate that word)-of-Blackness-by-omission, I suppose that the resultant crass ignorance, of people having been thusly conditioned by the machinations and manipulations of the wider society whose perpetrators have also gone through the same (mis)education system, there is hardly a way for the victims - us all – to escape being thoroughly infected by that untreated racism/colorism disorder.
It actually cuts right through the intellect too; some of the mot otherwise intelligent individuals in the country show – often inadvertently – their color bias.
So the revelation that 40 per cent of whites harbor negative views of Blacks is most likely a gross understatement of the ‘color status quo in the good ole’ United States of America!’
Moreover, it is my glum opinion that if Senator Barack Obama , as ‘articulate,’ ‘clean,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘talented’ and ‘savvy’ as he is, does somehow manage to win the presidency, it’ll be a complete surprise to me. But miracles do sometimes happen.
I truly believe that treating the disease of racism/colorism has already begun with our
