Racial problems persist (02/09)

By Nancy Xie

Feb. 20, 2009

On Nov. 5, 2008, the night after Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election, a Gallup Poll measured its record-breaking high value on the following: 67% of Americans agreed that “a solution to relations between blacks and whites will be eventually worked out,” while more than two-thirds believed that the election itself was one of the most important advances for African-Americans.
    Although the election of Barack Obama is a milestone in American race relations, we must not grow complacent, nor do we have the luxury to suppose that Obama’s election means that race relations can be ignored.
Two recent incidents in the Bay Area demonstrate the pertinence of racial issues and demand public sensitivity.
On New Year’s Eve, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed an unarmed black man, Oscar Grant, on the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland. Video images appeared to show Mehserle, who is white, shooting Grant face down on a train platform. This horrific death evokes centuries of racial history that the country would rather forget.
   The shooting of Grant has become a catalyst for a series of protest from Oakland’s community. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, about 1,000 protesters joined in a peaceful march from City Hall to the Alameda County Administration Building on Jan. 14, demanding a murder charge against Mehserle. A lingering group of protesters violently vandalized nearby business buildings. At a gathering outside City Hall, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums pleaded for nonviolence. “Let this day be a loud and profound statement that we came together for justice with a passion for peace," he said.
Despite of calls for peace, social unrest may ensue if Mehserle, who has been charged with murder, gets acquitted. A similar incident occurred in 1991 when video footage showed white police officers beating a black man, Rodney King. The officers’ acquittal on charges of police brutality sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots that caused an estimated one billion dollars in damages and 12,000 arrests.
In addition to the Oakland riots, an alleged youth hate crime in Richmond is a further example of racial tension in the Bay Area, ranked the most politically liberal region in the U.S. by the Bay Area Center for Political Research.
Seven white young men are accused of beating Brandon Manning, the black victim, on Jan. 24. They were charged on Feb. 3 with “assault with a deadly weapon and felony battery, with a hate crime enhancement,” according to the Feb. 4 San Francisco Chronicle. Suffering from severe injuries, Manning said that he could not understand “how somebody could do that in this day and age.”
   Furthermore, researchers at Tufts University and the Harvard Business School conducted two studies for the American Psychological Association on “strategic colorblindness,” or avoidance of talking about race. They concluded that whites and blacks of all ages, even 10-year-old children, would avert racial conversations to avoid appearing prejudiced. The solution is not to stop talking about race and pretending that prejudices do not exist; it is rather to confront the issues we fear discussing most.
   Obama seems to know that evasion is far from strategic. In a March 18, 2008 speech, he directly tackled the race issue, reminding Americans that it is a distraction from unity, an issue that “we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.”
   We must keep in mind that even if Obama’s election is a momentous stride for race relations, it is just that — a stride, a step, not a solution.