Something Sinister This Way Remains

This news came to me with something of a hard shock. The Dr. Gates and Dylan debacles, while controversial, were removed from my experience for two important reasons: they had happened to famous people, and they had happened outside of New York. It is almost understandable that in Cambridge, one might not know Dr. Gates because there are so many famous Harvard academics around, who can really keep up? As for Dylan, well maybe the officer involved wasn’t a music lover (or more realistically was thrown off by the fact that Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman). However, Professor Quiros is locally visible and local, in this case, is determined by my near-by sphere of existence. Of course, I am personally no stranger to such things. In the neighborhood I grew up in I was the token “white boy” and the resident “Jew” and both were facts that I was presented with often. I found it liberating and confounding to realized that as a Puerto Rican and as a Jew I was actually not the token white boy…but that information was hard to disseminate as sometimes white is determined by the green of money, and my heritage was (at least partially) stereotyped by a heavy wallet. In the neighborhood where I now live, we were inundated with a sea of looky loo neighbors who were curious to see just how brown the Melendezes were. I have always passed for that Italian brand of white, and while my wife is not Puerto Rican she is often mistaken for one. Our children are generally more “ethnic looking” than we are. In a few years it might just as well be my son or daughter listening to music in their cars getting arrested for not-even-driving while brown. I’m actually less concerned about their odds of being legitimately arrested than wrongly arrested…and that’s no way for any parent to live, regardless of their hue or ethnic decent. That is decidedly antithetical to the American ideal; decidedly Un-American.

There will be no post-racial America, or world, ever, nor should there be. I don’t personally believe that race should be divorced from identity but that doesn’t negate the dream of judgment based on the content of character over the color of skin (or place of origin). For all of our talk about progress, the lie of post-racial America, and the removal of racial and ethnic identity from public view with “supposed racism” over actual discrimination (see Politically Correct) kids in hoodies are still shot for being black, stop and frisk still violates the Constitution, and Tim Wise continues to make money had over fist as the white vehicle for brown concerns. As we march through and towards great leveling of opportunities (not ultimate but great leveling) we can look ahead on the path to powerful changes, but we must fight to relieve of the sinister thing that in our way still remains: the notion that upstanding Americans have a look to them. The sinister thing that this way remains is the idea that the eye can discern “who” and “what” kind of person it beholds and that the mind can instantly judge them based on that.

Related articles

• Our post-racial society, by @DavidOAtkins