Black Is Not a Dirty Word

Seems like in today's touchy, overly sensitive, on the lookout for bullies society, the very act of noticing that someone is black makes you a racist. You should be color blind, or at least pretend to be. And when a black person does anything at all newsworthy, good or bad, like steal a car, win the lottery, drown in a backyard pool or go missing--the non-racist will not mention the person's skin color in the description of the incident. However, if a white person does those things it's okay to describe him as such, and in fact it's preferable because then everyone can breathe a sigh of relief and say see, it wasn't a black person who did it, except in the case of winning the lottery where the sentiment would be, it shouldn't have been a white person because whitey already has enough money and has caused poverty among black people for lo these many years, not counting Oprah and Beyonce and Jay-Z and Kanye West and Harry Belafonte and Denzel Washington and Halle Berry and Will Smith and Gayle King and Al Sharpton and Bill Cosby and Chris Rock and Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee and all the basketball and football players and boxing champs, to name but a few.

I am perplexed by of all this. I personally have never enslaved anyone, white or black, Latino or Asian or Muslim or Jew or Native American or South Sudanese or Haitian or Tongan. I even let my cats run free. My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents also never enslaved anyone, although a couple of them fled Europe to avoid becoming enslaved themselves. What I have done is leave a comment on a recent online news story about an 11-year-old black girl who drowned after jumping into a pool on a dare. The story angle was that "Bullies Cause Death of Child." You see, she did not know how to swim. I noted that by her age, she should have known she couldn't swim, and since she was dumb enough to jump in anyway, it was simply natural selection at work. The online maddening crowd/Greek chorus tagged me as a racist, even though the girl's ethnicity had nothing at all to do with the story.

My bleeding-heart son (who doesn't vote) and my bleeding-heart husband (who sometimes votes Republican) each goes out of his way to avoid having any racist thoughts or uttering any racist statements.  They would never even call licorice "black," and in fact I think the reason they don't eat it is because they haven't figured out a politically correct way to do so. They may also find the title of this post to be incendiary. I think they are closet Democrats.