The U.S. Is Still A Racist Nation

Around the middle of the 1960's the United States passed some laws that effectively ended "Jim Crow" segregation. Coupled with Affirmative Action laws, this gave many white Americans the illusion that we have defeated racism in this country.

Nothing could be farther from the truth! The truth is that racism is still rampant in this country. It just does a little better job of hiding itself most of the time.

Several recent news stories bear this out. One of these is the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama. Recently, he has had to request a secret service bodyguard. According to Sen. Dick Durbin, this "had a lot to do with race".

CBS News had to discontinue allowing comments on their website from readers on stories about Obama's campaign. This is the first time CBS has had to ban comments on stories about a presidential candidate. The reason they did it was because of all the racist comments they were getting.

Mike Sims of CBS News.com said, "We have our rules of engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it". Normally, they just delete the racist comments, but that didn't work because of "the volume and the persistence" of the racist comments.

Just last week, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report on police traffic stops. This report states that after being detained by police on routine traffic stops, Blacks and Hispanics are far more likely to be arrested, searched, or treated in an agressive manner than are Whites.

Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU, said, "This report shows there are still disturbing disparities in terms of what happens to people of color after the stop." This report mirrored the findings in another report completed four year earlier. We are just now finding out about the earlier report because the Bush administration would not allow it to be released.

Meanwhile, the city of Farmers Branch is getting ready to vote on whether to uphold some racist laws passed by its city council, including a ban on renting homes or apartments to Hispanic immigrants. The U.S. government is also getting ready to build a fence between the U.S. and Mexico.

Some will try to claim this is an "immigration" issue and not a racial issue. That is not true. I don't hear of any proposed fences to be built on the Canadian border. Nor are any laws being passed to deny housing to white immigrants. "Illegal immigration" is just a new code word for racism.

Why does racism still exist in the United States? Because most Americans allow it to exist. Do you allow racist comments and jokes in your home or workplace? If so, then you are part of the problem. Racism will exist in our country as long as Americans allow it to exist.

It is time for decent Americans to stand up and be counted.