I've come to the acute conclusion that living in the 21st century is like walking on glass with a bullhorn against your mouth. Every single thing you say is heard by everyone and is at the careful scrutiny of the general public, but yet it is impossible not to say obtrusive things. With the prevalence of social media and the societal norms of projecting one's every waking thought out to the general public, politics and social discrepancies are often up for debate and many different viewpoints are pushed along social networks. This contrasts strongly with the era before the Civil Rights Movement, where the public did not have an open forum of interconnected people to debate in without being publicly and sometimes brutally persecuted for their beliefs. Truly beginning in the 1960s, racism was spotlighted by the nation and addressed as a national problem. This contrasts strongly with our nation today because we are blind to our prejudice. As a nation, we are told we are fair and equal to all, we spurn nations who still enslave and persecute, and yet we are walking on a tightrope to maintain this face of "equality" we claim to have embraced and adopted.
It is clear that racism still exists in modern society by events such as Ferguson and Treyvon Martin that racism still exists in this country and everywhere, and we are ignorant to ignore it. In studies published by Princeton University Press, "studies continue to reveal commonly held stereotypes of African Americans as less hardworking and less intelligent than whites" (TheRoot.com: Quiet Bias- the Racism of 2013). Events such as what is happening currently in Missouri show the startling similarities of today's acts of racism to those which happened in the late 1940s and 1950s. Events of white cops shooting men who are considered minorities in questionable situations that are made to seem like self defense is an act as old as the dawn of time. However, what is different about these acts in terms of today's society is the response that society gives to them.
In the early 1940s and 1950s, white extremists voiced their opinion loudly and were heard across the nation. Blacks were quashed and destroyed where they stood- their voices rose no louder than a whisper due to strict efforts of the upper echelon of society. However, the tides of today's society have turned- white extremists are judged and silenced by the voice of our "race conscious" society and minority voices are amplified by politics. We as a society have no problem saying that someone who is white is the oppressor and that they keep the rest of the races oppressed, but to say that we make concessions for people solely based upon their minority status is equivalent to heresy. We implement measures such as Affirmative Action to reconcile the sins of the past, but we fail to see the inherent racism in the measures we enact! If we wish to define racism as the judgment of the color of one's skin and the country of one's origin rather than "the content of [one's] character" then the enacting of measures such as Affirmative Action and special minority supplementary programs is, by simple fact association, racism.
In Invisible Man, the narrator states " I didn't understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear. How all of us at the college hated the black-belt people, the "peasants," during those days! We were trying to lift them up, and they, like Trueblood, did everything it seemed to pull us down" (Ellison chapter 2, The Invisible Man). I believe strongly that the implementation of measures meant to provide recompense for the sins of the past is insinuating that those who are minorities need the help of the upper classes to survive- this is an offensive assumption to many and is little stated due to its controversial and uncommon nature. Thomas Sowell, author of Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, states the situation with finality: "No policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution." Racism is recognizing differences and making judgments based upon the color of skin- the cure is not to blur and blind skin color from our vision, but to see it and not think about its implications. Racism in today's society is based upon the former half of this notion, and it is slowly infecting our nation from the inside outward.
