The problem is we all do it.
When the Black Entertainment Network made its debut in the 1980s, many of we liberal movement fighters applauded. Finally, we said, Black entertainers were going to get the recognition they deserved. The thought that there might be a closing out of entertainers who were not Black didn't occur to us. Black people in
One of the cases being closely looked at in the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotamayor is a case on which she ruled, Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she joined the rest of the three-judge panel, in rejecting a racial discrimination claim by non-Black firefighters for being denied promotion over the apparently less-qualified Black applicants. There is much made, on every side of the argument, concerning reverse discrimination and the failure (or success) of Affirmative Action initiatives, but one thing that is not said is that in every case, both before and after Affirmative Action, we subjectively set up circumstances which not only promoted, but promulgated, the segmenting of people via their skin color, religion, gender - name the dividing factor as you wish - instead of, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "by the content of their character."
In that single failure, we have not only betrayed the dream of that great man, but our own as well. And until we can look at a person from the inside out, we have to admit to ourselves that any "progress" we made as a result of the sixties, is very limited indeed - and very possibly an illusion.
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