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just saw the author Nell Painter on the Colbert Report. It's basically a history of the idea of race. Personally, I think this is something the general public knows next to nothing about and negatively impacts their view of race and identity. So many people in the general public believe that there has always been race or that everyone is inherently racist. There is so much misunderstanding surrounding it, and I sometimes get the feeling that the general public has simply accepted "race" as part and parcel of society forevermore because of the lack of understanding of its history.
Understanding the idea of race's origins is so necessary in understanding the bigger picture of unjustice and inequality. It's an open book laid bare, a great example of how the elite pit the masses against each other in order to control them. I already know about what is discussed in this book, being a history buff. What's sad is how hard it was for me to find it on my own. Part of the problem perhaps is that a lot of racial history was always couched as a "minority thing" and a history of minority peoples, instead of a history of race itself. If the history wasn't about your race, you didn't read about it, basically. In many American minds, the history of race is almost exclusively the history of slavery in the United States. This offers too narrow a portrait to really understand the idea of race beyond its present form and not its origins.
I'm a big history buff, and personally have a hard time understanding how anyone with a good knowledge of history could be conservative. Anyone who realizes this history will either have to accept the facts or live in delusion. I know some of the Teabaggers and others will never believe, but there is a sizeable chunk of the US who doesn't understand this history and this could only help to shift public opinion in a liberal direction.
I think the author was aiming for a greater audience with the title, and applaud it. I do wish the interview had been more serious because I was actually interested in hearing what she had to say. It's funny, because Colbert constantly ribs the idea of "colorblindness" as one of his conservative traits, but many guests he has on, liberal guests, do question the idea of race seriously or downplay its importance to their personal identity, and I always love it when his guests do that. Painter was trying to tonight and I've seen Snoop Dog deflect Colbert's rather obvious lead-in to "please recognize your racial identity". Whether they know it or not, there are far too many liberal entertainers out there who are doing more harm than they realize by playing to racial steryotypes for a laugh. I understand the jokes, but I find them funny because of their obvious stupidity. Unfortunately, I think many other Americans find them funny "because it's true". And Colbert comes across as pushing this line too much for me at times. Like in his interview tonight, when he said that if you listen to Jimmy Buffet, you are white. Haha. Unfortunately, a lot of his audience and the general public is ignorant of the idea of race and have it ingrained as part of their identity. They act a certain way because society tells them that's how their skin color is supposed to act, and Colbert and others sometimes contribute to that I think, even if they may think they are being ironic or whatever. All you have to do is watch Tosh.O sometime to realize how much comedy is about reinforcing societal steryotypes of all sorts. The audience laughs because it's so TRUE, not because it's so stupid, and that's the problem. And then Tosh acts so surprised when so many of the comments on their website are racist. Do you watch your own show? You are pretty much asking for it.
I read an article in Time magazine discussing how whites will be a minority in 2050. The author hyptohosizes that a sizeable portion of whites (the right-wing especially) will become more organized around their race and racial politics and identities will simply become more entrenched across the board. In some ways we can already see it with the Tea Party. I really hope he is wrong, and hope we can educate America enough to realize that race is just a convenient foil for the elites to screw over the masses, just one more meaningless divide to exploit.
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