I have a business card in my office. It is black and shiny, and in the middle, in about 20 point font are sparkly silver letters that say: RACE CARD. I love this card because it points to the absurdity of our political connundrum these days: to even point out that blackness is different than whiteness in our country race is now always already a bizarre tactic to shame white people everywhere. As though discussing race can only be leveraged by non-whites against whites.
But this election, there is an opportunity. A 50-state strategy, of sorts, to do much more than gain electoral votes.
Many of us have long believed, and Obama has shown, that this presidential race presents the country with a real opportunity to change the discourse around race. What has become more and more clear to me is that this race gives white people the opportunity to wield the race cards of whiteness to talk to their peers, their relatives, their co-workers and their communities about racism, overt and covert, and how it prevents this country from being its best self.
This sounds esoteric.
But every time a Republican campaign and its surrogates get desperate, race is the well that gets tapped. It was used against McCain and now it is being used by him. McCain has immediately drilled into that vein of race-baitingand flat out racismthat has been the hallmark of controlling populations for years. In an effort to distract from corporate greed and government abuses, working class white folks have had the message passed along (since slavery) that "regardless of how bad you are doing, at least you are better than a nigger." (I use nigger here because, as a black woman, it makes me crazy that this word is censored. Whose sensibilities are we trying to not offend here? It has already been used against me, I think we shouldn't try to ignore its potency.) This deployment of racism is precisely the genesis of the "uppity nigger" meme. The need to maintain an identity of superiority has been rigidly enforced and resulted, in its most extreme, in events like this.
So it heartens me to no end to see the emerging line of white people who have taken an active stance in acknowledging the benefits they have procured from this system as well as the damage that it inflicts to us all. Or just acknowledging that white people talking to white people about getting over racism (no matter the forum) is an amazing tool for this election and for our country.
That is why I was especially moved (to tears actually) to see this from the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka:
This election offers an unbelieveable to shift the muscle memory of this country, to actually look at, acknowledge, and then heal from the centuries of pain that racial oppression has meted out on blacks, whites, latinos, asians and native peoples alike. But it also is doing some work to shift the burden of this conversation from one that has been framed as between blacks and whites to one that is between whites and whites who have, disproportionately, benefited from those oppressions. Think this is wrong? Do you think a black woman with Palin's credentials would be tapped to be VP?
This, I think, is the sign of true progress. As Toni Morrison said: "Crude and crass as most of it is and, really, uninformed as almost all of it is, the discourse about race is important ... But the real conversation should take place among white people. They should talk to each other about that. Not with me. I can’t be the doctor and the patient."