Thanks to Facebook, I have recently been back in touch with people from what seems like a different life ?? particularly, folks from the conservative, Baptist, predominantly White college I attended and from which I graduated nearly twenty years ago. In that much time, some things ?? some people ?? change, and some things and people remain the same.
For me, college was a continuation of high school, where learning and learning to be liked alternated and competed for top billing on my life's marquee of personal goals. (I completed college with a 2.7 GPA, so it is clear which one prevailed.) Where I grew up ?? on military bases in a city with a large minority population ?? racial diversity was as ubiquitous as MTV . My schools ranged from being 98% Mexican-origin to highly diverse, though slightly majority-White. So when I showed up for college in the middle of Oklahoma, on a campus where I could count the number of people who looked like me on two ?? okay, maybe three or four hands ?? I was a bit taken aback.
But I knew one thing: you do not make friends talking about race, racism, racial discrimination and the like. So I did not (talk about it, much), and I did (make friends). When a few of the women from the campus's small Black Student Union asked me to join them at one of their meetings, I smiled, said okay, and quickly forgot about the fact that I never intended to go. Who wants to be part of the militant crowd when there are parties to go to, fun to be had, women to meet?
The reality, of course, was that I was not always able to avoid difficult discussion about race. But those are different stories for a different time. For the most part, I became a model for all our colorblind dreams. I even had one of those red, yellow, green ??Love Sees No Color ? t-shirts that were popular in the early nineties and wore it with pride, hoping forever to avoid those uncomfortable moments having to confront the issue of race.
Fast forward almost two decades. Facebook. Becoming new friends with old ones, eager to see how everyone turned out, these friends and acquaintances ?? many of whom I hadn't seen or heard from since we walked across the graduation stage.
In the heat of the moment ?? post 2008 election, the beginning of the nastiness of the health care debate, amidst the discussion surrounding Henry Louis Gates's run in with Cambridge cops, surrounded by birthers, hordes of ??I want my country back, ? protesters, yelling "communist, communist, communist" in the streets about everyone from Barack Obama on down to almost every Black person in or nominated for cabinet posts ?? I just could not help turning my personal Facebook page (not to be confused with the RaceProject Facebook page) into a site for political warfare. I posted articles of interest about race. I posted my own published or on-air commentary. I responded to comments made by my some of my new and old friends.
At some point, I looked over at my running count of friends. 666. Hmmmm. I could have sworn I was up close to the 850 mark. Seems that some of my friends were steadily peeling away, and I began to notice how I ?? like everyone else ?? had begun to take this race talk very personally.
"With the possibility of a recited "I pledge myself to President Obama" being in there, you're damn right I'm concerned. Bush never asked that. Clinton never asked that. Regan never asked that. There are three acceptable entities to which one may pledge oneself: God, Country, Family. To ease the confusion, Obama is NOT country."
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