09.15
I came across this article today and it got me thinking how right this guy is. My little girl is almost 5 and to my knowledge she has never made a comment in her short life about someone’s color. In her world people are either “sweet” or “mean”. They are “nice” or they “act ugly”. What they look like never even enters into it. You can see it in her eyes that she doesn’t see any distinctions based on the fact that some people look different than others. The reason she doesn’t see racial distinctions is because we as parents don’t make them. We have never spoken of anything involving race to her, so in her mind, it doesn’t exist. And that’s exactly how I want her to be for as long as possible.
But inevitably, some day when she is older that is going to change. Someone is going to charge her with racism because she’s a Christian, or a conservative, or whatever. On that day she will have to face the fact that what we have today is not racism. It’s pop-culture racism, where people are racists by association, not by definition. Here in the south people get charged with racism at the drop of a hat. That makes no sense to me. The level of integration between blacks and whites in the south is rivaled only by the integration of latinos and whites in the southwest.
It’s easy to charge others with racism from a northern perch where the communities are lilly white. Conversely, southerners are living out racial diversity in the streets every day; making it work for the good of our communities. Pure racism makes me sick, as it should all Christians. I just hope my kids will not have to be unjustly accused just because of a regional, religious or political association that has nothing to do with race at all. But that’s a pipe dream and I know it.
