"That a successful middle-class black man in this country cannot buy or sell a home, raise and educate his children, or pursue his life's work without having constantly, and in innumerable ways, to deal with the stigma of race surely has something to do with the survival in that man's mind of a fealty to "his people." If you want him to abandon the figment of the pigment, why not lend a hand at dispelling the enigma of the stigma?"
Folks, in spite of denial, I'm sorry to have to say this but those who ignore race in America live in fantasyland. This piece, while long, dissects the major conservative talking points.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97nov/race.htm
by Glenn C. Loury
"The case made in this book for racelessness is abstract, divorced from the texture of social life in this country, made mainly in the service of a color-blind policy argument, and, ironically, ahistorical. The authors like Colin Powell - and so do I. He is, for them, the black-who-doesn't-harp-on-being-black presidential candidate, whose promising electoral prospects in 1995 showed that the country was ready to move beyond race. Yet if one reads Powell's autobiography and his revealing interview in The New Yorker, or if one spends time talking to him, as I have done, one discovers that consciousness of race is at the very core of his being. He knows, and freely says, that but for being black he would never have risen to his position, and having so risen, would never have commanded the political interest that he did. That he is not a race-monger is to his credit, I believe. But his life story is no brief for racelessness -- quite the contrary. Indeed, just about every effective strategy of which I am aware that is being carried out in poor black communities to combat the scourges of violence, low academic achievement, and family instability builds positively on the kind of ethnic consciousness that Powell's biography exemplifies. There is remarkably little in America in Black and White about such positive race consciousness."
"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac." James Baldwin
Folks, in spite of denial, I'm sorry to have to say this but those who ignore race in America live in fantasyland. This piece, while long, dissects the major conservative talking points.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97nov/race.htm
by Glenn C. Loury
"The case made in this book for racelessness is abstract, divorced from the texture of social life in this country, made mainly in the service of a color-blind policy argument, and, ironically, ahistorical. The authors like Colin Powell - and so do I. He is, for them, the black-who-doesn't-harp-on-being-black presidential candidate, whose promising electoral prospects in 1995 showed that the country was ready to move beyond race. Yet if one reads Powell's autobiography and his revealing interview in The New Yorker, or if one spends time talking to him, as I have done, one discovers that consciousness of race is at the very core of his being. He knows, and freely says, that but for being black he would never have risen to his position, and having so risen, would never have commanded the political interest that he did. That he is not a race-monger is to his credit, I believe. But his life story is no brief for racelessness -- quite the contrary. Indeed, just about every effective strategy of which I am aware that is being carried out in poor black communities to combat the scourges of violence, low academic achievement, and family instability builds positively on the kind of ethnic consciousness that Powell's biography exemplifies. There is remarkably little in America in Black and White about such positive race consciousness."
"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac." James Baldwin
