The history of United States is a story of various struggles and the struggle against racism is, perhaps, most prominent in the minds of students at liberal arts colleges. In America, racism is largely characterized as a white behavior and rightly so.
It was the whites who propagated slavery. It was the whites who instituted the Jim Crowe laws. It was the whites who passed the Chinese Exclusion act and it was the whites who forced over one-hundred thousand Japanese Americans into internment camps during WWII.
Clearly there is a historical basis for blaming America's racist history on white folks, but achieving a truly post-racial society requires that we resist the temptation to create race-based policies for the purpose of correcting rancid injustices of the distant past.
In the 20th century the United States made extraordinary attempts to bring about racial equality and it did so through a combination of cultural and institutional changes. The civil rights movement exemplified effective cultural change that laid the foundation for a post-racial society; however, the institutional structures that have been created in order to promote racial equality now threaten to crumble that cultural foundation.
Attempts to eliminate racism from our society using the legal system may have been justified in their day, but now they have led to the institutionalization of policy based on race. In fact, race-based policies have even created a new form of racism: reverse racism. To be honest, there is really nothing reverse about it. This form of racism is wrought from the same ethnic-based discontent and is equally detrimental to the goals of a free society. Unlike the violent racism of the past however, reverse racism is subtle and seemingly harmless.
Subtle and passive as it may be, reverse racism is ubiquitous throughout American colleges. Take a look around Bowdoin College campus and you are bound to see posters for the Asian Students Association, the Latin American Students Organization, and the African-American society. Absent from this collection of race-based assemblies is a White American Students Organization. Even the thought of such a group seems frivolous, laughable, and even racist. But why?
The idea of a WASO is ridiculous because any group which is predicated on racial divisions is itself racist. Every one of these race-based institutions is dedicated to reinforcing the idea that students should feel more comfortable associating with people of their own race. By encouraging racial divisions within our community we are actively preventing the realization of a post-racial society.
Admissions offices across the country pursue non-white students in order to fulfill their multicultural quotas. When you filled out your application for Bowdoin College you were asked to check a box indicating your race, but why? If race doesn't matter, then why ask? Questions of race on college applications can mean only one thing; for college admissions officers, race does matter. That race helps to determine an individual's acceptance to a college is not affirmative action, it is discrimination in action.
Make no mistake, the yearning for diversity which motivates such policy is remarkably beautiful, but it has corrupted the very idea of character-based judgment embodied by the civil rights movement. Affirmative action served an important function in paving the way for gender and racial equality. No one can argue that the results of affirmative action policy are undesirable, but the means by which these results were achieved are contradictory to a post-racial society and progress necessitates a reevaluation such race-based policies.
Even the justice system of the United States acts as an agent of reverse racism. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the first law passed to prevent race-based violent crimes. If a white man murders another white man, then that is just ordinary homicide. But under this law, if a white man kills a black man, he is guilty of a hate crime and will receive harsher punishment than if his victim had been white.
Even though all violent crimes involve some form of hatred, in the United States only interracial violence merits the title of "hate crime". The American justice system uses racial discrimination in order to prevent racial discrimination. What bizarre and savage hypocrisy!
There are those who believe that America must go above and beyond in its efforts to enforce racial equality. But when will this stop? Must we have a congress whose racial composition is equal to that of our nation? Must we have the wealth of this nation distributed equitably along racial lines? Or perhaps the quest for multiculturalism will necessitate race-based population control to ensure that no neighborhood becomes too culturally or ethnically homogenous? I understand the old argument that the pendulum must swing both ways, but racism is one instance where society cannot fight fire with fire.
Let me make it abundantly clear that this reverse racism of which I write pales in comparison to the violent racism of the past. Nonetheless, a truly progressive post-racial society will not encourage affirmative action policies, hate crime legislation, or any institutional structures predicated on race. We have come too far as a nation to allow even subtle racism to infect our culture.
Our generation, the inspired youth of America, have the power to accelerate the transformation into a truly post-racial society. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."