Riding the Colorblind Express
Jon, are you 2 years old? The photo on your profile is of an older man, but perhaps that is artifice. If you are indeed 2, then I apologize for anything I have said that may have hurt your feelings. It was inappropriate.
If you are not 2, and the photo on your profile is a relatively accurate representation of your likeness, then I have a question for you. Why are you on Medium? Shouldn’t you be on Extreme or something? Are you here to torture yourself or just to troll (and while I am no psychologist, I assume that self-hate and trolling are not unrelated)?
Of course I didn’t vote for Obama because he was black. But I will say that the day he was elected was one of the happiest days of my life. I grew up in a working class mixed-race section of the Bronx in the 1960's. My friends and I dreamed of helping to build a society free of racial injustice, but never in a million years would we have believed that we would witness the election of a black president during our lifetimes. There was just too much overt hatred, prejudice and fear. My joy at the election of a black president was not because he occupied the White House, but that society had changed sufficiently over the past 50 years such that the American people were willing to look past the color of his skin and choose him to be president. That is an extraordinary voyage, and a testament to the willingness of the American people to reject overt racism.
The voyage to racial and economic equality has, alas, not yet been completed, nor — as evidenced by recent events — have we totally eclipsed good old-fashioned racism. Indeed, it is up to people of conscience to redouble our efforts to build the world we want to inhabit. A world where the color of one’s skin truly doesn’t matter. We may never get there — but 50 years ago playing with my friends in the Bronx, we could never have imagined having a black president, so I would say that anything is possible.
