It Matters Now

Race, I mean. It didn't used to, at least, not to me. I grew up an Army brat, and practically every place I lived was a mini-UN, with whites and blacks and Asians and Latinos and some categories you never heard of running around. We all played with each other, we all hung out together. My Dad was a true-blue racist, as was my Mom on occasion, but it didn't take. While he railed against blacks and Chinese (in significantly egregious terms), I was with them down the street. All the things he said about them just wasn't my, or most of my peers, experience. Seemed to be generational: our Depression-era World War 2 veteran type parents were a lot of racists, while most of us, their kids, weren't. Familiarity breeds nonchalance.

But now?

I don't know the point in time where it changed, but I'm guessing the OJ Simpson trial. I mean, in the face of overwhelming evidence, he's acquitted? Because of non-specific racism against blacks at some point in history, and because no one likes the LAPD? Oh, c'mon!

Oh. C'mon.

Because if there is one thing that shows whites and blacks are universes apart in their understandings and concepts, it's that trial. I was utterly baffled by the verdict, but a black guy I knew, wasn't. He exulted. And I looked at him, speechless; two people were butchered, and it simply didn't matter, because some black guy was a slave 150 years before. Nicole Simpson died for our sins.

And since then: Hurricane Katrina, the Duke Lacrosse team, the Philadelphia Black Panthers, the Cambridge police acting stupidly (at least, according to the post-racial President), Don Imus...and now this Zimmerman trial.

I am baffled, again, by some of the things I've heard from blacks on the radio and TV: Zimmerman shouldn't have gotten out of his car, he shouldn't have followed, he just should have taken the beating...

What. The. Hell?

And there's no need to go into it, seek an explanation, understand it, because the problem is obvious: whites and blacks are universes apart. We don't even speak the same language. We are two distinct alien species with absolutely nothing in common. And I guess it's always been that way, regardless of my experiences when growing up.

That's sad. Really, really sad.