An interesting thing happened to me in the past hour. After I taught my two Ethics courses this morning and held office hours, I did some errands and came home. I put Shelbie's harness on and took her to the nearby middle school for exercise. We don't walk on the school grounds when school is in session; we stay on the other side of the fence, which is a meadow interspersed with trees. We're visible to the people on the school grounds during part of our walk.
The weather is beautiful today, so there were quite a few kids on the grounds. From a distance, I saw kids walking in groups on the athletic track. For various reasons, I ignore the kids. I'm usually deep in thought anyway, so while Shelbie runs and sniffs, I think. Sometimes I hear the kids yell at me or say, "Look at the dog!" I ignore them. Today, when I was about 50 yards from the track, I heard someone yell. I wasn't sure it was directed to me, but then, a few seconds later, I heard the word "Racist!" I continued walking without looking. I never did look.
I infer from the fact that I'm white that the girl who called me a racist is black. (It's a racially integrated neighborhood.) Let's think about this. I'm a racist because I didn't look at her or reply to her. How does she know I'm a racist? A racist is someone who employs a double standard. Members of one's own race are treated differently (specifically, better) than members of other races. It could be something as small as giving members of one's own race the benefit of the doubt. (Racism can be subtle.) So the girl had to be assuming that I would have looked at, and perhaps replied to, a white person. How could she possibly know that?
This got me to thinking about race relations. The girl, who couldn't have been more than 13 years old, has already learned to accuse white people of racism—without having any grounds for doing so. She uses the epithet "racist" as a weapon. So who's the racist here? Me, who ignores all the kids at the school, or the girl, who presumed to know how I, a stranger, would have acted if she had been white? Wasn't she stereotyping me? Wasn't she treating me as a "typical" white person? Wasn't she making adverse assumptions about me because of my race? Wasn't she giving me the detriment of the doubt rather than the benefit of the doubt? Isn't that racism?
I'm not optimistic about the prospects for a post-racial or colorblind society, not when whites are presumed by blacks to be racists. I blame people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for this sad state of affairs. They have a vested interest (financial and otherwise) in keeping racial tension alive, and do so at every opportunity. One thing I like about Barack Obama is that, unlike Jackson and Sharpton, he doesn't play the race card. He seems uninterested in exploiting white guilt or stoking black resentment. That's the kind of change I can believe in.
