Ostensibly, the [thousands of emails he has received about the case] are about Vick, about what he did and what he did not do. But they are really about us. Go beyond Vick. He doesn't matter anymore. They are about the intractability of race. They reveal the faces behind the American mask, the black and the white at stubborn impasse. Vick has provided us an unwelcome mirror, shown us who we are when we're held up close to the light, what we are really thinking when we walk past each other every day, each wearing the same uniform that says "America" across the chest. The uniform is the same, but clearly, after he exposed the raw nerves of race and class and privilege, Vick has shown us we are not all playing on the same team. We've always known this. But maybe we thought that by living better than our parents, at a greater distance from the bloody collisions that pockmarked their lives, we had made progress.
Vick shattered that illusion, telling us that despite undeniable progress in rights and opportunities, we don't understand each other at all.
Ultimately it does not matter that it is hard for many of us to find a serious racial component in the Michael Vick dogfighting nightmare or in the latest OJ Simpson revelations. The racial perceptions exist. And if they exist, if people's perceptions are so reliant on their ethnic background, then those racial components are real. It does not take much serious thought about race in America to realize just how far we've come. But we are not at that promised land yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment