Post-Racial America?

So the new buzzword is "post-racial". Folks we just aren't there yet, electing a Black president doesn't somehow mean that the issues of race in America don't exist. We have to be real about the racial inequities in employment, housing, education, criminal justice, health and other arenas. I don't know many people that would say that race is irrelevant everywhere. With that said, i'd also like to make clear that I believe race is no longer an excuse. There is no such "the man" dominance or oppression or monilithical sentiment amongst African Americans. I can imagine that the reason so many people are believing that we have steeped into a post-racial era is probably because of the yardsticks being used to quantify the progress and status of African Americans in this country. I don't think it's too far off to say that non African Americans tend to measure how far we've come while many non African Americans measure how far we have to go. The most complete picture, of course, requires both measures. But who can be surprised that blacks and whites each tend to gravitate toward the measure that is most forgiving of their individual groups, that shoves the onus for change off on the other? The black yardstick, after all, leaves black people no obligation other than to demand justice and equality from white people. The white yardstick requires of white people only that they exhort black people to become more self-reliant and take more responsibility for their own problems. But what if you are an American who realizes there is no either/or here, no need to buy into a false dichotomy that requires you to choose one yardstick over the other? Once you've turned off the television and encouraged black children toward academic excellence, you still must contend with the fact that their schools are too often crumbling, underfunded and staffed with inexperienced teachers.
Once you've gotten black women and men to raise their children in the context of families, you still have to deal with the fact that those families need places to live, jobs to support them and doctors to keep them healthy, all of it elusive as long as structural discrimination persists in all those areas. And, once you have convinced black children to stop defining themselves by denigrating stereotypes, you still have to fix a racially biased justice system that treats them as crimes waiting to happen. The Urban league recently released a report that Blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites, according to the group's annual State of Black America report issued Wednesday. To pretend these realities are a thing of the past is to make yourself part of the problem. I am inspired by the notion that a country with such a sordid racial history has progressed to the point where we now have a Black President. I also know we have far to go, I have started with myself, finishing my degree, teaching myself financial discipline, waiting until marriage to have children, trying to be a role model to my siblings and being proactive in my community...Starting with self is the best we can do.