Divided we stand

This is deserving of a much longer post, but I will try to bang it out tonight - perhaps I will get halfway there. Despite my (not so) youthful idealism, I honestly do not ever see a way out of the racial divide in this country. There a lots of reasons for this, many of which are well worn. The one that makes me the lose all hope, however, is the fact that a vast majority of the people in this country belong to what I would call a "post-racist era". This is not to say that racism does not exist at the level of individual people. Nor am I denying that indecencies large and small are visited upon black people all the time. Rather, the "post racist era" is one in which the history under which blacks resided in this country for 350 years loses all meaning because they are not a part of the historical or current reality of the people who are here now.

Slavery was an obviously unfair system. By obvious I mean that it was clear at the who benefited and who suffered. Slave owners' gains (monetary) tied directly to the slaves losses (pick anything here, the list is really too long to summarize). It was a zero sum equation. Fast forward to Reconstruction and the equation becomes less clear. Certainly the institutionalized apartheid in this country prior to the Civil Rights Act worked to the advantage of whites, but this system had also eliminated the clear connections between the oppressed and the oppressors. Because the benefits of the system were distributed more broadly across a larger swath of people, how much any one person "gained" became more difficult to tease out.

Jump ahead again to today and the calculus gets even murkier. We have the most just system that has ever existed in our country (this doesn't mean it is truly "just", only that it is better than everything that has come before it) still, Black Americans are on the whole severely disadvantaged. However, the nature, tone and circumstances of this inequality is either so pervasive or so ingrained in our society, that non-black people today cannot point to any real advantages their race affords them. Even people who believe on an intellectual level that there is inequality among the races have a difficult time citing specific instances that are a direct advantage of their race. Today, the scions of the slave-holding families of the Old South do not seem to experience any cognitive dissonance over the fact that their inheritance was built on the backs of blacks' lost freedom. These are the people for whom the direct link between racism and personal material benefit was the most direct. This being the case, it seems to me an impossible stretch to expect the descendants of the immigrant wave of 1870 - 1900 (let alone more recent arrivals)to contemplate the much more abstract set of benefits that they experience because they are NOT black.

With every passing generation, the "that was a long time ago, get over it" argument gains more and more credence. As a result the possibility of reconciliation and amelioration becomes more and more distant.