Ascribing Racial Intent Instead of Answering the Question

It is disappointing to hear a former President's assessment that those citizens who question President Obama's policies and practices do so based on a racist agenda. The very fact that the former President assumes that the current President's racial background is an issue defines where he's coming from, not where the rest of the citizens are coming from. On the contrary, the fact that the country elected President Obama speaks against this underlying bias, an obvious fact that is being obfuscated by the barrage of racist attributions.

I don’t know anyone who is not biased either in favor of a specific aspect of life or against it. Personally, I have issues with people who speak poorly, as well as those who write incomprehensible diatribes against the system that is, in many cases, supporting them. I have issues with bad drivers, especially when they do not possess a valid driver’s license and the mandated insurance coverage for which I pay a tariff tacked on to my own bill: a fee for uninsured drivers, of which I am not one. I also have issues with those who live above their pay grade, fooling themselves into believing that they are worth whatever life has to offer even when they cannot earn it for themselves and/or pay for it. I particularly abhor that any woman pays hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars for shoes: my bias against that kind of flagrant waste of financial resources sets my blood boiling.

The point is I don’t care the skin color, ethnicity, religious or political affiliation of the people who drive me crazy, the people who bring out the worst in me: it’s their actions and words that elicit the response. When people assure me that it “f-ing don’t matter,” I have to bite my tongue before I tell them that it does matter to those who hold themselves to a higher standard than street language in the workplace. I’ve been the victim of several fender-benders, all of which involved negligent drivers, some of whom were not insured, but none of whom qualifies as a minority. My neighborhood is a vast wasteland of empty homes, abandoned by tenants who spent money they did not have to live high on the hog. It happens that I live in a part of the US that has a predominantly Hispanic / African-American population, many of whom also belong to gangs and/or have prison records. That’s geography, not racism. The women who buy the designer shoes live in the designer communities, so I don’t have to deal directly with their flagrant lifestyle choices!

People have biases, but I’m betting that the majority of people’s biases are not racially biased – well, unless you count the African-Americans who insist that black marry black, or the Hispanics who think that brown has to marry brown, or the Oriental who feels that it dilutes their unique ethnicity to marry outside their race, or the Arabs who feel that it dishonors the family if one marries outside of it, or the Greeks who prefer that Greeks marry one of their own, or the Jewish worshippers who really, really want their children to marry other Jews. Or Democrats who feel that it's a family lifestyle, not an individual political decision. Or wealthy Republicans who prefer that their pampered daughters don't marry a gold-digging penniless idealist. Or police officers who believe their career is a family legacy. Or service members who follow the family tradition of service to country. I believe that every culture has a right to its own biases/cultural preferences -- and that includes all of the white-skinned people who represent cultures unique to people with white skin.

Today, using the race card is morphing into something insidious: denouncing whites as racists for voicing accusations of blatant illegal action, as well as questioning the decisions of the country’s policymakers if the person on the receiving end of the accusations/questions is not white. It's awful when ignorant people believe that everything in life is racially based, but to have it come from the mouth of a former President becomes a precedent: if a former President says it, it must be true -- not just his opinion. His words become the foundation to keep the racism ball rolling through another generation, effectively impeding the progress made with the last Presidential election!

No one should ever be prohibited from asking a question and no one should ever refuse to answer it clearly, concisely, and honestly. We have nothing to fear from the truth and everything to lose from deception that begins with anyone's assumption that a question is a racially motivated action.