Is racism disappearing or changing faces?

    She has very lively blue-green eyes, sandy blond hair and her skin is sparkling white. You might even mistake her for Snow White.   

“There’s one thing I just cannot understand,” she tells a fellow English teacher in Buenos Aires, while waiting for a student to appear.  

“What’s that?”  

 “I’m from Brazil.”  

 “Really? 

 “Yea. I learned English on an exchange program. They sent me to live with a family in Texas.”  

“Texas, the land of the cowboys…and Bush…”  

“Look, my father is black, well, dark, mulatto, but I never even stopped to think that he was Negro until I arrived in Dallas.” 

“What happened?” 

“Well, I was looking at some photographs of my father and the mother of the family I was staying with asked me who the man in the photograph was. When I said he was my father and the woman’s face wrinkled up and she said: ‘you mean your father is a Negro?’ Until then I had never even thought of my father as Negro. That made me realize what it means to live in a racist society.”   

The teacher's comment raises the question: Is the united States still a racist society—in spite of  some dark cream colored politicians who have lately appeared in some important government offices? That depends to a great extent on the measuring stick used to determine what is “racism.”  

According to Gary Kamiya in the Salon news letter, more than a third of black Americans no longer believe that blacks are a single race.

There would appear to be a sort of de-emphasis of racial issues as the never-ending “war against terrorism” drags on and on.

“It’s hard to believe, “ writes Kamiya, “that just a few years ago, issues of black vs white dominated the national discourse. The Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson case inspired endless discussions and reams of editorial soul-searching.  Affirmative action and racial preferences, multiculturalism, and political correctness were fraught topics. The  twin towers fell, and suddenly we had a completely new enemy to worry about.”  

True. The U.S. has had a long history of enemies and the wounds of its own Civil War are but patches of a protracted process of social struggle and change.  

And the country’s wars inevitably end up influencing race and social structures on the home front. During the Second World War blacks went north to man the factories short of manpower…and when high technology began to shelf manual labor slums began to haunt northern cities.   During the Vietnam War blacks occupied the front lines in a blatantly outrageous proportion to whites. The present war against Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other hand, shows a great percentage of soldiers of Latin American origin.  

Getting back to the blue eyed daughter of a Brazilian mulatto: It certainly isn’t that race discrimination does not exist in Brazil. Discrimination still appears deeply engrained in Brazil and throughout most of the world. But, according to the English teacher, in multi-racial countries such as Brazil people don’t deal with each other on the basis of their color.