I’ll never forget the first time someone called me a racist. I was in eleventh grade at my high school in Los Angeles. It was another kid in my class that I had just met. He gave me some attitude, and I asked what his problem was. He simply said I was a racist. I was totally taken back, and when I asked what gave him that impression, his only answer was that I was a racist because I was white.
Until then, I had never thought about whether or not I was a racist. I had never considered skin color as a factor of anything at all. I grew up with friends that were White, Black, Latino & Asian… and I’m not saying that I had some sort of respect for people of a different race. I didn’t, because it wasn’t even a factor. I didn’t think of there being anything different to respect or not respect. To propose it to me would have been no different than asking if I took issue with people that have blonde hair. The question in and of itself is puzzling.
I’m not trying to say that I had no knowledge of racism. Of course I did. We studied it to no end in school, talked about it in class, but I never had any connection to it. To me it was something of a different place and time.
However, that day in high school something changed. The kid that had called me a racist for no other reason than the fact that I was white suddenly became different. He judged me based on my color, and nothing else. I was suddenly forced to see him as different from me. I suddenly had to treat him differently than others, causing me to create a category for him in my mind. In other words, with respect to him, I was now a racist.
Later in life, I had been talking with my childhood best friend. He had developed a huge issue with race. He was Asian, and said that he often encountered race-related obstacles. Some of his stories had me feeling for him, and some had me thinking he had a chip on his shoulder and would take any unexplained situation and make into a race issue. The thing is, that I had never thought of him by his race…. Until then.
The more he talked about the fact that he was different, the more he became different. He was incredibly sensitive to anything that he might consider racist, to the point that I found myself walking on eggshells to make sure I didn’t offend a person that I considered like a brother.
Doesn’t this create more racism? If you want me to see you as different and treat you differently than I would treat the person next to you, aren’t you insisting on a racist bias?
So I notice it more and more over the years, especially when people talk about the ‘Race Card’. Seriously, what did race have to do with OJ? Do we really believe that if Rodney King had been white, the cops would have offered him milk & cookies?
Now it is getting more and more intense with Obama in the White House. An overwhelming majority of Americans voted for Obama. But every time someone has a problem with his policy, people start yelling that they are only complaining because he is black. Really?
In the history of this country, democrats and republicans have never seen eye to eye. One has always disparaged people from the opposing party. They do it because they disagree on the issues. Why is it that now someone that disagrees with Obama’s issues is accused of only disagreeing because of his color?
Every time I see this happen, I see people trying to change the rules of politics because of race, which I believe can only lead to frustration and a greater problem with racism.
We are creating Frankenstein’s monster here.