"The Speech"

Being very isolated in general, I am not connected into the ongoing reaction to Barack Obama's speech on Race yesterday. I have read a lot of the first reactions with a sense of shame and anger and not any sort of cohesive way to express this. Until I saw Jon Stewart.

Obama's speech was to observers transcendent, historic,cloying, honest and political suicide; sometimes by the same person. But it shouldn't have to be. As Jon said, he spoke about race like we were adults and it's obvious a lot of us can't handle that.

Just taking in the speech before the reactions, I could not get over how amazing it was for him to say what we, as a nation, needed to hear about this most touchy of subjects, damn the political consequences. But the reactions made me realize how right he truly was.

When I worked at the toy store, at the surrounding neighborhood everyday I saw an almost casual kind of multi-culturalism; kids of every color from around the world playing together. But did that mean there was no racism? Uh, no. We as human beings cannot control our prejudice, but we can know that these impulses are wrong and still be ashamed of them.

The kind of racism that displayed itself there was of the reverse kind; where you do something racist while trying too hard not to be racist. I'll explain:
Once a lady didn't want to leave her bag in the store, but she made sure to let my black co-worker know that it wasn't because she thought she was going to steal it. It's the by-product of these politically correct times; in an attempt to prove that everyone's the same, we've forgotten that were actually all different, we just shouldn't be judged by these differences and we shouldn't forget that they exist.

Ignorance is when your smart enough but you just haven't learned enough to know better. It's hard to remedy anything if you don't acknowledge it exists or won't honestly talk about it. What specifically am I talking about, Race, Culture? That nagging cough? What am I NOT talking about?