I have spent the last week getting to know people from all over the world: refugees from Iraq and Iran, students from Ghana, a Korean-German cheeseburger artisan, a Turkish telecom businessman, room mates from Germany and Italy and Spain and Austria. One thing that hasn’t come up even once is race.
In America, the issue of race today basically has two perspectives. It is either a dividing force of injustice or a pervasive effort to correct that injustice through the empowerment of historically marginalized groups paired with the silencing or disruption of “the oppressor” (or everyone else). This is a distinctly American issue. It’s a local cultural metaphor or constuct popularized by dead generations to justify exploitation of minority groups and then redefined by academics in the seventies to mean the opposite.
Language does only what it must. So why does this metaphor continue to exist?
The metaphor of race in America exists today only to perpetuate contrived divisions or to perpetuate backlash towards it.
Soon, the last extant dregs of the former will be gone forever, swept away by the winds of time. And the age of the latter in America will truly begin. The only cure for the former is time. And time is inexorable. It is perhaps no mistake that the astrological age of the king is at it’s end and the age of the child at its dawn.