Race Matters

A story in today's NY Times is a good refutation for anyone thinks we live in a post-racial world.  Actually I don't know any serious person who thinks we live in a post-racial world, but I know people who, for whatever dishonerable reason, like to pretend we do, or who act as if the best way to bring it about is to act as if it already exists.

The story is about Michelle Obama's white relatives in the south.  There is one 69-year-old woman who, even though she says "you really don't like to face this kind of thing," who has decided “I can’t really change anything....but I can be open-minded to people and accept them and hope they’ll accept me.”  Gawd bless her. The rest of the family are hiding in their houses and refusing to talk. I don't get it. Why the trauma?

It seems to me that there is a lot of sentiment in the south that celebrates the confederacy but wants to sanitize history by pretending slavery didn't exist or, if it did, that it didn't involve my ancestors.  A corollary would be that, if my ancestors were slave owners, at least they were the good kind.

Accept it. Slavery existed, and slave owners raped slave women. Consensual sex undoubtedly took place between owner and slave as well, and we can also contemplate the fact that some sort of love was a possibility (although it always stopped just short of emancipation, and there was always the extremely awkward and weird situation of knowing that some of your slaves were your children).  The point is that we don't know what happened in any given situation, and who cares at this point? Your great-great-great-grandfather raped his slaves?  Well, there was a lot of that going around at the time. It doesn't reflect badly on you.

Living in Brasil, where mixed race backgrounds are the norm, but not many people can connect their lineage with the wife of the President, I am amazed. As I suggested at the beginning, race still matters in the U.S.