And he was calling US brainwashed?!?

I have yet to mention Herman Cain during this entire election season. Most of the times that I am made aware of something he has said/done, I sigh, roll my eyes, wonder how any self-respecting Black people are Republicans, but generally keep it moving. Most of the time, his assorted statements of ignorance aren't worth me getting all riled up about. 

Today is NOT one of those times. 

Let me begin by saying that I'm not fundamentally at odds with the goals of like, various iterations of the racial uplift movement. I am right alongside Tupac when he says, "We need to change the way we eat. We need to change the way we live. We need to change the way we treat each other." We as individuals and collectively as a people need to take responsibility for our actions and lead our lives in ways such that the flipside of success is not death or jail. We need to create families that work (regardless of whether they resemble the nuclear family), we need to stay in school, we need to pull our fucking pants up. (That last one is just a pet peeve of mine.) We need to understand how to generate wealth and capital rather than just income. BUT all of that is just part of what needs to be done; we also need the various government institutions we interact with on a regular basis to stop being inherently over-suspicious of us, we need due process under the law, we need school systems to not give up on us before we can not give up on them. I'm not asking for anything special, but the whole damn game needs to be changed before we can say it's fair.

Anyway. Back to Cain. This man tried to use the old tired claim that because he knows individual Black persons who have risen to the top of whatever field and blah-de-blah-blah, racism doesn't hold people back. He tried to say we don't actually want to succeed. 

“I have seen blacks in middle management move up to top management in some of the biggest corporations in America,” the candidate explained. “They weren’t held back because of racism. No, people sometimes hold themselves back because they want to use racism as excuse for them not being able to achieve what they want to achieve.” 

And you know, if that was all he'd said, I wouldn't be writing this right now. There are a lot of people who just skim the surface of race/class-based societal issues like this and see culture as a viable excuse. I pity them for their disregard for the institutionalized history of either accumulation or dispossession on the part of members of certain groups, as well as for the way they can totally ignore the distribution of social, cultural, and material assets, and I pity the larger population for being under their influence. I can't even entirely fault them for their ignorance, because in this country we aren't taught to look deeper. 

But that's not all he said. No, this might-as-well-be-named-Uncle-Tom Negro brought himself on CNN, opened his mouth, and said,

"I don't believe there is racism in this country today that holds anybody back in a big way."

*cue record scratch*

Sir. SIR. Pause. Rewind. Let me make sure I understand the words that just came out of your mouth. In the face of unequal drug sentencing mandates, 46% of Black males between the ages of 16 and 35 being unemployed, more Black men in jail than in college, reputable sociological documentation that it is easier for an ex-felon White man to get a job than a Black man with no record (see Devah Pager's Marked), the fact that Black men still earn only about 70 cents on the White man's dollar, that hate crimes are happening all over the country, that the newest wave of feminism has called women the "niggers of the world" during Slutwalks, that race is still directly linked to poverty, that studies confirm that having an ethnic name or "sounding ethnic" makes one less hireable, that even at schools like Princeton, Blacks are more likely to take time off than members of any other racial category, that the housing crisis has affected Blacks disproportionately, that there are still places in this country where the color of my skin alone makes me feel unsafe...do I need to continue? We could do this all day. 

Post-racialism is a concept I'm uncomfortable with in all but its tamest forms. Post-racism, you've got to be fucking kidding me. This is America. We were FOUNDED on racism. It didn't magically just disappear because a disproportionately low percentage of Black people have beaten the odds. It's systematic. It's ingrained. We've been working on changing things since the Abolitionist movement, and I'll be damned if fool statements like this are going to lead people to believe we can stop now.