Writing the Next Chapter on Race

By Judith Browne-Dianis, Co-Director Advancement Project

For several months, the media has been pushing the fairy tale that the United States moved beyond racism with the election of President Obama. As untrue as that is, there are people who started acting on their post-racial fantasies years ago, eight years in fact, as the Bush Administration used that excuse to essentially stop enforcing the civil rights laws we already have. President Obama and his administration have the opportunity to take dramatic steps towards dismantling institutional racism and inequality by simply enforcing the laws that are already on the books. Rather than blindness or silence, taking this action requires us to live in reality so that we can change that reality.

On November 5th, 2008, we woke up in a nation where people of color are nearly twice as likely as Whites to live near toxic waste dumps. We woke up in a nation where healthcare inequities mean that a Black child is more than twice as likely as a White child to die before age one. We woke up in a nation where Black and Latino students are more than 20 percent less likely to graduate from school than their White classmates and more than twice as likely to be arrested when they are at school. All of these disparities exist with government support or permission.

Despite these glaring inequalities, for the past eight years the federal government did nothing, living in the comfort of the post-racial fairytale. Thus, our government largely pursued a “hear no evil, see no evil” approach to structural racism and injustice. The Supreme Court has refused to “hear” the evil of discrimination through decades of narrowing discrimination protections and taking away citizens’ rights to bring their complaints to the ears of the courts. In complicity with the Court, the Bush Administration willfully refused to “see” the discrimination around the country. Although the executive branch has broad power to intervene against structural racism and injustice, it turned a blind eye and stood idly as though nothing were wrong.