The Issue Of Color In America

The truth, as much as the Roberts majority might like to hide from its halls, is that the United States has yet to shake its sharp color vision, and the court’s recent actions will only stoke it that much further. If 2012‘s influx of voter suppression efforts, significant disparities in health, wealth and incarceration rates based purely on race aren’t demonstrative enough, a simple press of a TV’s “on” button or cruise through the web might be informative. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited a 2011 instance–among many other similar incidents–where an Alabama state senator referred to black people as aborigines. Last week, opinion was hotly divided (and largely by race) on Miley Cyrus’ culturally insensitive use of black people as props in her latest music video. There were actually debates regarding Paula Deen’s racism (re: asking an employee to design a wedding for her brother a la “Gone With The Wind”, featuring “a bunch of [tap dancing] little nigger” servers in bow ties). And as the prosecution began to make its case this week during the George Zimmerman trial, pundits on and offline spent an alarming amount of time discussing not the facts of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony and how they might advance the case, but rather how she might be misunderstood by her white jurors. Some more unsavory characters were quick to pin Jeantel as “Precious”, others said they saw visions of black civil rights advocates in Jeantel’s eyes, and others still bickered back and forth on who understood–and misunderstood–Jeantel more, again the degree of understanding corresponded with your skin color. Colorblind? Hardly. Color-confused? Certainly.

The point is that when it comes to equality, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t look at the American people and strike down parts of a law that prevented millions from being treated as equal under the law while overturning another one that ensured it. The United States has finally begun to see in rainbows; if we want to truly eradicate black and white from that spectrum, we must first acknowledge that those divisions still exist.