The fallout from the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. continues. While Gates can now joke about his “teachable moment,” the state of race relations in America is no laughing matter.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes:
The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.
Indeed, Obama’s support has fallen below 50 percent among white voters for the first time since Inauguration Day.
Truth be told, white folks’ anxiety about black folks is as American as apple pie.
I recently checked out “RACE: Are We So Different” at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
The multimedia and interactive exhibit, curated by the American Anthropological Association, explores the history of race, the science of human variation, and race and racism in the United States.
The Race Project separates fiction from fact. And the truth is, racial classifications are based on nurture not nature:
The idea of race has a complex and convoluted history in the United States and its development over the past few hundred years has left a legacy of misconceptions and confusion about race among many Americans. In a country founded on ideals of freedom and justice for all, notions of race served to rationalize slavery, justify the near-elimination of Native Americans and their cultures, and privilege people viewed as white. Science played a key role in the construction of race, with scientists attempting to classify humans into a taxonomic system on the basis of presumed biological and other differences. Linking race to biology led to a “race science” that attempted to legitimize race as biological fact and account for differences in peoples’ capabilities and their supposed superiority or inferiority. Not surprisingly, with this confounding history, misunderstandings about race abound.
The historian Robin D.G. Kelley observed:
Race was never just a matter of categories. It was a matter of hierarchies.
Info about the Race Project is available here.
For the tour schedule, go here.
