Denial Is Not a River In Egypt

Have we seen enough Cliven Bundy coverage yet? How about Basketball’s Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling?  I am going to go out on a limb and assume everyone but the comatose know Cliven and Donald by now. I find it extremely ironic that, as these two old white guys reveal to the world their archaic putrid festering racism, one voluntarily and the other involuntarily, our Supreme Court [SCOTUS] has been busy neutering the seminal civil rights accomplishments of the sixties. Last year, declaring racism dead in this country, the SCOTUS killed section 4 of the voting rights act of 1965  that was implemented to keep certain states with a rich history of race hate from imposing any discriminatory or otherwise restrictive voting laws such as literacy tests or today’s photo I.D. requirements that discriminate against the poor and racial minorities.

To graphically illustrate the continuing necessity and efficacy of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the very minute the SCOTUS struck it down, Texas passed an arbitrary, I’m just going to come out and say it, racist discriminatory voter law that was waiting in the legislative hopper of the Texas state house for just such an occasion. Racism is dead, my ass.

One of the most amusing reasons given for this regressive judicial behavior is that the country has a black president now, so we are good to go on that race thing, right? Wrong. President Barack Obama is the most reviled president we have ever had, simply because he is black. Can anyone remember a member of congress yelling out “Liar” directed at the president in a state of the union speech before Obama? Lord knows there have been some doozies uttered in the past by white presidents, but no one would ever think of yelling out at them. WMDs and Nigerian Yellow Cake come to mind. Has any previous president had his origins or legitimacy scrutinized to the point of absurdity? Has there ever been such vile vitriol voiced by certain “celebrities” calling for the death of a sitting president, and not immediately been arrested by the Secret Service?

I have plenty of reasons to be disappointed with the president and his administration, but they have zero to do with his pigmentation, but I digress.

The latest civil rights law to find itself in the cross hairs of the SCOTUS is Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action came about because some free thinking black and white folks recognized the only way poor black people had a shot at the American Dream was to begin being included in that dream. After centuries of African Americans being systematically and “legally” held back while white Americans participated in the political process, the educational system and the economy, allowing for savings and investments and passing that money along to subsequent generations, the playing field has become severely lopsided, to say the least.

Chief Justice Robert’s clever little quip on the reason to strike down Affirmative Action; “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”, is a great line any high school debate team member would be pleased they came up with, but false reasoning, no matter how cute, is still false. Affirmative Action is an attempt to make up for that lost time and lack of opportunity and to allow minorities a shot at just getting on that ladder so they might begin to climb it! In other words, waiting for America to do the right and moral thing was just taking too damn long and something had to be done.

It would seem that too many white Americans are unable or unwilling to recognize their role in our historic version of apartheid, if you will, the glory days of the southern “separate, but equal”. Where does this fear of all Americans sharing in a common bounty come from? It is totally unfounded, illogical and self-defeating. Civil rights are everybody’s rights. That’s why they are called rights, not “Please, sir, may I have a little more?” The pursuit of happiness, I think, would include equal opportunity in employment, housing, education and participation in the political process. The haters and obstructionists seem to be getting all the attention now because they are desperate and in their death throws. Soon the Cro-Magnons like Bundy and Sterling and their ilk will fade away but the SCOTUS is a stacked deck of neo-con wet dreams as evidenced by recent rulings. I will always hold out hope that someday we will tip the scales back in favor of common sense and fair play for all.

For now I’ll leave you with a quote from the contemporary urban poet, Eminem, from his piece “White America”, we are living in a “Democracy of hypocrisy in the Divided States of Embarrassment”.

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Alex lives with his wife, Anna in Key West, Florida. He enjoys writing poetry and prose and making the complacent uncomfortable.