Pat Buchanan, Trayvon Martin, And Why Racism Isn’t Going Away
Animal Farm
When Scott McLeod sent me this tweet, I said, “What?”
No way. I know this was written back in 2008, but it’s worth re-reading because of the recent conversations about race, and specifically, the Trayvon Martin proceedings. The way the conversations have gone, it’s almost as if many people (many of them conservative Whites) have a “race fatigue,” meaning they think we’ve achieved post-racism as we know it. People who argue this want to tell President Barack Obama to shut up about race already. No longer do we have to work within the confines of race dialogue, and, in their arguments, believe everyone falls in one of three categories:
- They hate everybody else, not just people from a specific race / class / gender.
- They don’t see color, just people a.k.a. color-blindness.
- They perpetuate race discussion by continually talking about it.
I’ll address these backwards because the arguments only deserve a few lines.
#3: Talking about class doesn’t actually perpetuate the stratification of the poor and the