|
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks at a rally at Victory Landing Park in Newport News, Va., Oct. 4. / AP-Yonhap |
 By Ananda Selah Osel
In case you're pretending not to be paying attention, the presumptive democratic presidential nominee is black, just the right amount of black, and he's come not a moment too soon.
Privileged liberals may find it bewildering that while Barack Obama stands on the periphery of the presidency of the United States, racism and racial bias are alive and well. If you live in a place like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, or the like, you may not have realized it but you're living in an elusive microcosm.
You know the intergraded neighborhoods, the interracial couples, and diverse people you see grinning at each other on the street? Well, that doesn't exist everywhere. It might not even exist at all. In-fact it may be the opposite.
The United States, even now, is flush with blatant racial discrimination and bias. It manifestly exists in housing, education, disaster relief, public elections (in the form of voter disenfranchisement), law enforcement, criminal defense, and prison admission to name only a fantastic few.
As Barack Obama enters the nascent stages of new history, black and Hispanic Americans comprise approximately 63 percent of the incarcerated population even though they roughly comprise only 25 percent of the national population.
Human Rights Watch has documented new statistics and found unrelenting racial disparities among drug related offenders sent to prison in 34 states. These states send drug offenders of African decent to prison at significantly higher rates than whites even though whites commit more offenses.
Furthermore, young blacks arrested for homicide, are at the very least, three times more likely than white youths arrested for the same crime to receive a life sentence without parole.
Are we to believe that blacks and Hispanics have a genetic predilection for crime or is it more likely that systematic oppression of minority groups continues to noticeably affect these groups even as the United States is electing its first African-American presidential nominee?
According to Uniform Crime Reports, in 1996 black Americans were the victims of sixty-eight percent of all racially motivated hate crimes. Fast-forward a whole decade later and blacks still comprised over sixty-six percent of hate crime victims.
Even after September 11 and the push for same-sex marriage in the early 2000's, anti-black hate crimes astoundingly dwarfed those motivated by religious affiliation and sexual orientation ― a staggering and telling fact that illustrates the ongoing undercurrent of racial feeling in the United States.
While it's obvious that overt racism has waned since the days of Jim Crow, it's probable that racial bias still influences the vast majority of U.S. inhabitants.
If your privileged enough to have health coverage you've more than likely heard something resembling the following from your physician: ``Do not stop taking the antibiotics just because your symptoms began to lessen. Finish the entire prescription, otherwise the virus may return."
Eradicating the virus of racial bias needs to be regarded similarly by Americans otherwise racism and its discontents will simply continue to morph, infecting us in new and different ways.
After more than 30 years of research, Prof. Jack Dovidio of the University of Connecticut estimates that as much as 80 percent of White Americans have racist feelings they may not recognize.
The professor says that racism has mutated into a new form that is hardly identifiable. ``Contemporary racism is not conscious, and it is not accompanied by dislike, so it gets expressed in indirect, subtle ways," says Dovidio.
Studies conducted at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin support Dovidio's position. The results of these studies were published by the Association for Psychological Science in 2007 and revealed that only a mind-boggling 7 percent of white college students did not show any racial bias.
What's noteworthy here is that the tests were conducted on university students, one of the most liberal and progressive crowds in the United States and a sizable portion of Barack Obama's support base.
The results discovered that non-biased subjects differed from biased subjects in a psychologically fundamental aspect ― they were less apt to develop negative emotional associations.
According to the researchers ``whether someone is prejudiced or not is linked to their cognitive propensity to resist negative affective conditioning." In other words, the very few who are resistant to conditioning are likely to hold less racial bias.
This means that while the majority of Americans may adopt progressive principals which could lessen implicit racial bias; those principals do not rid one of such bias.
Because racial associations remain deeply embedded in the U.S. psyche, a change in the predisposition of the masses may require a collective reconditioning of social and cultural mentality.
The authors assert that this overhaul could be accomplished through affirmative interpersonal experiences with minorities and/or more exposure to positive media portrayals of minority groups.
The research here suggests that reason alone cannot eliminate racial bias, yet the United States has arrived at a tipping point ― a tipping point that could perhaps be the catalyst to our permanent reconditioning.
If the overwhelming white majority elects a black man to represent its national interests it will be defiantly doing so in the face of mammoth historical precedent.
Ananda Selah Osel is poet and polemicist currently perusing an advanced degree in psychoneuroimmunology. He's a contributor to The Humanist and the Washington Free Press among others. The writer lives in Seattle and can be reached at: aso-sel@hotmail.com.
|
