Racism Is Still Around And It's As Blatant As Ever

I was angry when I saw this image the other day, because it happened in my home state. It's a picture of some students from Flower Mound (just north of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex) in the crowd at a basketball game between Flower Mound High School and Plano East High School (whose team was largely African-American).

The signs stayed up for about 30 seconds before, to their credit, teachers from Flower Mound rushed over and made the students take them down. It later turns out that someone had also urinated and defecated on the team bus of Plano East. Citing privacy concerns, the school administrators wouldn't say whether the perpetrators had been punished, or what their punishment was. I'm not buying that argument. These students (aka, racist creeps) committed their offense in a very public way -- now the public deserves to know if and how they were punished.

But perhaps even more important is just why these students thought they could get away with such a public display of racism. They obviously are surrounded by many others, both students and adults, who find this kind of behavior acceptable, or worse, maybe even heroic. And they were willing to risk some minor punishment from the school to receive the accolades and pats on the back from their fellow racists.

The truth is that racism never died in this country -- it just went underground for a while. But the election of an African-American to be president horrified the racists, and now they are back with a vengeance -- and far too many Americans let them get away with their blatantly racist behavior. And they are egged on by the behavior of some of our elected officials.

We saw a prime example of this in a couple of statements from elected officials this last week. In Mississippi, Republican State Rep. Gene Alday told a reporter that African-Americans in his town were "lazy" and just laid around waiting for their "welfare crazy checks". He went on to say he had to wait for hours in an emergency room because of all the black people "in there being treated for gunshot wounds".

Alday later said he was not a racist, and his remarks were supposed to be off the record. Unfortunately for him, that makes no difference. A racist remark is evidence of racism, whether it was made on or off the record. If you quack like a duck, then you're probably a duck.

Then we have the case of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani had the audacity to say "I do not believe that the president loves America". Since Giuliani has not made that accusation against any other president (of either party), we can only assume he said it because the president is African-American (and he knew it would please the racists in his party's base).

Giuliani later came up with a rather lame and silly excuse after being called out for his racist statement. He said he couldn't be a racist because the president's mother was white. That's utter nonsense. It sounds like the old joke about being a "little bit pregnant". Racism is an all or nothing game, and it can't be explained away by saying the person you are denigrating is only half-black. Being a little bit racist is just as abhorrent as being blatantly racist -- and it cannot be acceptable in a country that preaches equal rights and opportunity.

These are just two of many examples -- and whether they realize it or not, these politicians are setting a behavior example for people like the "white power" students at Flower Mound. If racist behavior is OK for our politicians (who should be setting a better standard), then it is OK for anyone else.

But it is NOT right -- not for the politicians or for anyone else. It is reprehensible behavior, and it hurts other people. It is time for decent Americans to step up and make it known that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.