Black America, White America, and Racial Sensitivity

The latest racial discussion and debate going on in the United States is stemming from the senseless death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Florida high school student that was gunned down in a gated community in Sanford, a community northeast of Orlando, by 28 year old self-appointed Neighborhood Watch representative George Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic. Martin, who was wearing a hoodie, roused apparent suspicion from Zimmerman, even though Martin was unarmed and only carrying candy and a can of iced tea that he got from a nearby convenience store and was only walking back to his father's girlfriend's house to watch the rest of an NBA game he was watching.

Black activists and social activist groups, along with a massive national viral campaign, are calling for Zimmerman's head arrest for murder, vehemently disagreeing with the Sanford Police Department's assertion that  Zimmerman claimed self defense and by way of a controversial Florida law passed in 2005, cannot press any charges or proceed further in an investigation. Martin's parents started a petition on Change.org which has sense collected over one million signatures calling for a federal investigation into the shooting because they lost confidence in local authorities to do so. According to a few stories I came across, this is not the first time Sanford has had issues in regards to race and police investigations.

I'm going to take this post to explain the current state of race relations in the United States that a lot of mainstream writers are either too scared or too polite to really write about: why blacks, and now whites, are so sensitive about race.

Social sensitivity is mostly an acquired trait, as in, you're taught reason to be sensitive. Often times, it begins at the home.

If you're black, like myself, and you're my age (24), you undoubtedly have parents and grandparents that grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. And while the movement resulted in landmark decisions such as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- black resentment of whites, in truth, never completely wavered. So for a significant number of us, as we were growing up, we were taught the "don't trust white people" mantra, as they believed (and they justified this based upon their experiences growing up) that whites were only out to hold back and suppress the black man.

Couple that by the limited education we receive in today's public and private schools in elementary and secondary education (or intermediate and high school for those that don't know what the hell I meant) about the black American experience -- i.e., "blacks were brought over on ships to the 'New World' in the 'Atlantic Slave Trade' by 'Spaniards, Britons, and Portuguese'...then some blacks were given freedom for fighting against the colonists in the American Revolution...then blacks were considered 3/5th of a person the U.S. Constitution...then blacks spent the rest of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century trying to end slavery and achieve equality both socially and legally" -- it only adds to that sensitivity.  It's an additional reason why I can't stand Black History Month -- it aims for black empowerment but it only reinforces black sensitivity. It's the difficulty that most activists have in separating language of empowerment and language of sensitivity, that erects unnecessary boundaries within our culture and our community.

What further adds to it is that no matter where we go as blacks, we're often subjected to pandering -- which only adds fuel to that sensitivity fire. The Democratic Party, for example, openly courts blacks for the simple reason that they are black. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Quannel X (for those that are from Houston reading this) have made their careers out of pandering to black sensitivity with their numerous grandstanding antics and events. Affirmative action, while well meaning, is another example of pandering. In short, a lot of the time, we're not taught to look at ourselves as being human before anything -- we're taught to look at ourselves as being black before anything, and while there are positives and negatives to that, the overwhelming negative is limiting how we look at ourselves in the mirror.

Now, I'm not saying these things and trying to say that racism does not exist, because it does -- blatantly and passively -- and I'm not saying these things because I don't think that "because I'm black" is a legitimate reason to give, because there are many times out of a hundred when that is a legitimate reason as to why certain things occur. I'm saying these things because I hope that sooner or later, we have a major philosophical and cultural shift to where we adopt the ideal of "before you look at me as someone that's black, look at me at someone that's a human being" and that ideal is self-reflective and not used as a justification or defensive punch line towards someone else. However, I do realize that is a major generational shift. At the same time though, everything that I just said about black America can be said about Hispanic America, Native America, Asian America, and yes, even white America.

White America has generally always been sensitive about race, but largely it was out of a Western European egotistical attitude which further fueled a combination of fear and a distorted superiority complex over black America -- especially black men. Over time, that attitude has not changed and really, it has manifested itself into a different dimension.

Where white America still fears -- really with black men -- black masculinity (i.e.. "This black guy will whip my ass.") and still possess attitudes of cultural superiority (see, "All Pejorative Statements Made About Hip Hop Culture, Blacks and Welfare Programs, and African American Dialect, Otherwise Known As Ebonics, or to Harry Reid, The Negro Dialect"), it's not to the degree where white America will actively campaign to openly violate or restrict black civil rights to the degree that was seen in this country from end of Reconstruction to end of the Jim Crow South. In a way, it's less about white supremacy and more about "white pride" and "white separatism".

However, there's a new dimension to white racial sensitivity that has not been seen since really the Reconstruction Era. Whites, really Northern whites, during the 1870s began to resent blacks and the whole Civil Rights Movement of the 1870s, largely due to exasperation from the Civil War and the fact that Northern whites more or less stopped giving a damn whether or not Southern blacks were ensured of their civil rights. As you well know, Southern Democrats (yes, for those that don't know, the Democratic Party was black America's biggest enemy up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election in 1932) seized this opportunity, regained control of Southern state legislatures during the later half of the 1870s and the early 1880s and ushered in the Jim Crow era.

This attitude of white American resentment of blacks has regurgitated in the past few years as white Americans became increasingly irritated with what they feel as the federal government's pandering to black Americans at the expense of white Americans. An example of this is the current American conservative movement to more or less wind down and cripple social programs that the poor (and as a consequence a significant proportion of black Americans) depend on, even if the majority of the beneficiaries to social programs in the United States are white. A major example right now is the affirmative action case recently brought to the Supreme Court by a student (who is white) that applied to the University of Texas a few years back and was denied, feeling that it was UT's affirmative action policy more than anything that was at fault. This whole "angry, white America" has fueled the political commentaries of Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, and Bill O'Reilly and also bolstered the American Tea Party Movement when it was at its peak during 2010 and 2011.

You're now also seeing more social and Internet memes such as "Why isn't there a White History Week?" or "Why isn't there A White Entertainment Network?" -- direct examples of the new dimension of white sensitivity. If I had to sum it all up into a shorter way to express this it would be: for the first time white Americans are asking the same questions about themselves and their identity that black Americans have been asking for the past two centuries.

I'll wrap this up by saying this: we're going to keep discussing race for a long time. It's unfortunate that in the mainstream media that an honest assessment of racial sensitivity is not made. Hopefully, this post gets around the way it needs to get around and opens eyes. Post-racial America will not ever come to fruition until the color of one's skin becomes secondary and not primary. As long as it is primary, then we're going to keep having discussions and we're going to keep having responses and we're going to keep asking the same questions we've been asking every time an incident occurs where race may be a question.