Yesterday I wrote about a great film in Simple Justice | The Story of Brown v. Board of Education: The End of Separate But Equal in Schools. Civil Rights made tremendous strides in the wake of Brown. It was a tumultuous time and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the way to racial equality.
Today, we have a president that represents the progress on behalf of all minorities. What was unthinkable a generation ago, is the reality of our world. Imagine a 70 year old black man from the deep south who remembers attending a segregated school and looks in the newspaper in 2010 and sees someone who would have been institutionally discriminated against as the leader of the free world. What a feeling that must be…
But along with the good, comes some bad. In the last few weeks I have seen some examples of Reverse Discrimination as well as oversensitivity.
This article on ESPN.com caught my eye a couple weeks back: Winners Hurt by Corporate Bad Judgment. In a Step-Off dance competition an all-white team initially took the crown. But after a mystical “scoring discrepancy” was discovered the judges awarded a co-title to a black team as well. Step-Offs are traditionally won by black groups and most of the participants are black teams.
Everyone assumed that the mystical “scoring discrepancy” was non-existent and the judges were not exactly forthcoming with details to support their decision. Had this been a reverse situation, where the white team lost in a traditionally white sport or competition, like alpine skiing, and a black athlete won and the judges later awarded a white athlete after finding a mystical “scoring discrepancy” the outrage would be powerful, unrelenting and deserved. But it was the reverse and aside from a few sports columnists and bloggers, it went unnoticed. This is not what Brown taught us.
I also saw this news item: Black Barbie Sold for Less Than White Barbie at Walmart Store. Apparantly, demand for an identical white Barbie was higher than for a black Barbie and the price reflected the lower demand. So on one shelf two identical Barbie’s were only distinguished by their price and their skin tone. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But people took offense to it. There are those who said that it was racist and discriminatory.
It must have been real tough for a black consumer to see that, but it was not intended to hurt, nor is it inherently hurtful. I can understand the sensitivity to seeing that, but there is nothing actually wrong with it. Today, there is nearly no institutionalized racism. Racism today exists in the hearts and minds of those who act as racists and equally so, in the hearts and minds of those who perceive racism in what they see.
We have come a long way in 50 years and of course there is a ways to go still. But I believe that the best thing to do would be to stop classifying people along racial lines and shades of skin color. Both of the examples above rely heavily of skin tone and race. The dance competition took action when a non-black team won a traditionally black competition. The outraged shoppers of Walmart saw a lower price for a doll that was a darker skin color and reacted as well. Just as the majority cannot discriminate against the minority, the minority should not be oversensitive to perceive bias in the majority.
It is my true belief that the “melting pot” of America will continue to help each and every one of us to judge a person by the content of their character and beliefs and not the color of their skin. It is really a completely illogical, irrational way of thinking to use skin tone as a difference between people. There is nothing innate about skin color that can have any relevance to a discussion about the merits of a human being. Most people realize this by now and I think we are getting there…
Unfortunately for some, the effects of decades of discrimination live on. Just watch this ABC News video that employs the same testing done for Brown v. Board of Education with modern day black youth:
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