A Time for Change

When Barack Obama was elected, there was a lot of chatter as to whether the struggle for racial equality had ended.  I found this astonishing.  It was almost as if a segment of America wanted to sweep America’s ugly racist past under the rug and deny its racist present.  The inconvenient truth is that racism is still with us and not just in the deep South.  This past February, I posted about the racial backlash after the election, “‘White Heat’: The Racial Backlash After Obama,” including an attack on Kaylon Johnson simply because he was African American and his truck had Obama stickers on it.  The media ignored incidents such as these because they focused on the newly elected African American, his wife and young children.  

By the time his inauguration rolled around, there was a lot of talk about Martin Luther King and the struggle for desegregation.  The talking heads on CNN, MSNBC and Fox were asking if the struggle for racial equality was over now that  Barack Obama was President and, incredibly, some said that it was over.  ”We are all equal now.”   

Are we?

The New York Times recently had an article about Montgomery County Georgia where segregation is till a way of life to which whites cling.  The Montgomery County High School has two proms – one for whites and one for African American students – and in that part of the world, that is their way of life.  According to the New York Times, ever since schools were desegregated in 1971, Montgomery County has had racially segregated proms.  

Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County High School students — referred to by many students as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school through student committees with the help of parents. All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed. According to Timothy Wiggs, the outgoing student council president and one of 21 black students graduating this year, “We just never get anywhere with it.” Principal Luke Smith says the school has no plans to sponsor a prom, noting that when it did so in 1995, attendance was poor.

Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”

“It’s awkward,” acknowledges Jon Paul Edge, a senior who is white. “I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.” Trying to explain the continued existence of segregated proms, Edge falls back on the same reasoning offered by a number of white students and their parents. “It’s how it’s always been,” he says. “It’s just a tradition.”

A tradition of racism to which whites in the deep South cling.  These are the people to whom Ronald Reagan was speaking when he was talking about welfare mothers driving Cadillacs and “strapping young bucks” who were allegedly not doing their fair share and that was in the 1980′s.  In 2000, Karl Rove “invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.”  As recently as 2006, the RNC ran an ad against Harold Ford, Jr., where a white woman claimed to have met Ford at a “Playboy Party” and saying with a wink, “Harold, Call me.”  Ford was single and had attended a Playboy party with 3,000 others at the Super Bowl in 2005.  The commercial was an obvious attempt to play the race card and tap into racist white fears of interracial dating.  

So the next time I hear someone saying that since Barack Obama was elected, there is no longer racism, I will think of those people I have discussed above and the white people who I have met on Twitter who have advised that they cannot display any Obama memorabilia on their clothing or cars for fear of bodily harm or property damages.

We’ve come a long way, but unless you’re deaf and dumb, we still have a very long way to go.

\ :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::