On Racism and Politics...

I am Caucasian. I have brown eyes. I have dark hair. I have a fairly long…last name. Do you know anything about my political views? Of course not. It would be ridiculous to assume otherwise.

Why is it then that it seems acceptable for the media to assume, that due to a genetically determined increase in melanin, black voters will blindly pull the lever for the candidate who happens to look like them? Where is the outrage? Is this not insulting? If you turned on the news and heard comments like,” well Joe Candidate is right-handed and is expected to carry Little Town, USA- a historically strong right-handed community”, I would suspect that you would be scratching your head, and rightfully so.

I have always been of the opinion that the more we define ourselves by ridiculous, arbitrary physical characteristics, we move further and further from a harmonious society. We seem to be obsessed with aligning ourselves into little tribal subsets. At the end of the day we are all supposed to be Americans. What used to be the unique thing about this experiment that we call America is that we, from various backgrounds, came together in a collective philosophy which espoused a common vision and a certain Espirit de corps which defined all of us is no longer palpable. Sadly, I think this time has passed, if indeed it ever totally existed at all.

What we have in its place is a loosely connected amalgam of individual tribes and an ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality. We have managed to fractionate ourselves ad nauseum. When I hear someone define themselves as an African-American or Italian-American or insert-your-flavor-of-the-month-here-American it irks me. Worse than this however, are the liberties that are taken along these lines; both tolerated and celebrated in the media. This divisiveness seems spawn an entire industry of Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons; ready to pick up the banner of perceived unfair treatment and inequality and run with it in the pursuit of, what can only be assumed as, vanity.

I am not naïve; I understand that, ridiculous as it may be, there is a certain level of racism that remains pervasive in our modern society. What I cannot fathom, what I will never accept, is why we still widely perpetuate that ideal. This is exactly what is done when political pundits make statements like “Obama is projected to do well” in some area just because it happens to have a high number of black citizens. This election in particular has focused on the “Black vote”, the “Female vote” or the “Hispanic vote”. Aren’t we supposed to be smarter than this? Shouldn’t we vote for the candidate that represents us best? Because you are a woman do you think any candidate with a vagina will best represent you? Or, if you happen to be black, that a black candidate will somehow make your life better solely on the basis of his/her skin color? What a ridiculously provincial idea!

The truth however disturbs me even more. The numbers, so far, indicate that the majority of black voters actually do align themselves with the black candidate. I suppose it is difficult to parse out why an overwhelming number of black people vote for one candidate over another. But I suspect this is, in part, symptomatic of the larger problem. We seemed to have created a society where being a victim is a good thing. Racism, sexism, ageism, religious discrimination, or any other perceived slight toward a group fills some sort of void and allows identification with a group that satisfies some internal need to “belong”. People think that somehow voting for the candidate that has: the same pigmentation as you, or the same anatomical features as you, or prays to the same god as you, will be the panacea that brings you fulfillment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Perhaps I am just cynical but despite the rhetoric, I suspect that people have much more in common with each other than they do with any of the candidates they throw their support behind- skin color notwithstanding. If we need to draw an invisible line in the sand we would be more accurate to do it on the basis of wealth and power and influence vs. the non thinking subjugated masses.

The time is long overdue when we demand more of ourselves than to bleat on cue and thrust our support behind a candidate based on any silly physical criteria. Dum spiro spero.