This campaign season has been very long. We've sat through countless hours of interviews, debates, advertisements, and analysis. We've contemplated various candidates' platforms, opinions, character, and judgement. Now, there's just a few days left before the election. And, there's one thing bugging me. There are some people out there who want to vote for Barack Obama for President, yet will not because of his race. To those people I have one thing to say.
If you don't vote for Barack Obama simply because he's black, you do not deserve to be an American.
This deserves repeating, just so I'm clear: if you would vote for Barack Obama were he white (or some other race), but instead will not because he is black, then you do not deserve to be a citizen of the United States of America.
I know, I should explain myself.
At first glance, you may think not voting for Obama because he's black is an acceptable, albeit privately shameful, position to take. After all, this country was founded on class inequality, the taking advantage of others, and blatant racism. From the time the Pilgrims landed in New England and began one of the largest displacements of a native people, to the brutal enslavement of Africans for cheap labor, to what we're experiencing now with discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals when it comes to marriage, we've built our country on the whipped, blood-stained, shunned backs of people that aren't like "us". Ironic, given "us" by nature has been an ever-changing panoply of colors, creeds, and backgrounds.
So why should we stop now?
Because we're not in an 18th century colonial state anymore. Because we've learned from our mistakes. Because we've moved on.
Not everyone has caught this memo yet, so I thought I'd share it with you all. We've moved on. We've hung our heads in shame, yes, and uttered whatever flimsy apologies we could, but we've moved on. We're done enslaving people. We're done with treating people as second-class citizens. We're even done with publicly smiling and patting people of other races on the back and privately gritting our teeth at them. We've moved on.
We realize how wrong it was to enslave people, to drive them from their homes, to treat them as second class citizens, to enslave them, to deny them rights. We've built a seemingly insurmountable pile of shit in our country's past. And now we've moved on: to the phase of trying to take that pile of shit apart, all the while apologizing for building it in the first place.
Not everyone, indeed, seems to have gotten this memo. Some people still cling to this pile of shit, dirtying themselves with ideas like denying others the right to marriage based on their sexuality, or treating immigrants as lower beings simply because they want to work, or assuming someone is going to rape and shoot them because their skin is a different shade than their own.
Sure, racism isn't dead. We all have internalized versions of it of various kinds. And that's OK: dismantling that pile of shit takes time. But we recognize what's part of the pile, and that some things come from the pile, and we consciously shut them out. When we do that, that's one more part of the shit pile dismantled.
That's why I think people who won't vote for Obama because he's black should be ousted from the USA: it's because they're from the past, and moreover the bad past, of our country. They're the old, painful, hurtful way. We've moved on.
So, I encourage those people who fall into my category of racist voters to do one of two things. Either recognize where your feelings are coming from, surpass them, and vote for Obama despite them. Or, pack your bags and move. Our country, our people, and most importantly our children are not benefiting from you.
And, we're charging ever forward to dismantling even more of that shit-pile that continues to oppress the people in this country. Trust me, you won't fit in as we dismantle it even more. You may as well move to a more backwards-minded land now while you still can. At least then you'll have only people like yourself to put down and discriminate against. Maybe that will be the greatest apology we could hope for, in the end.
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