I'm homesick.
I never thought I'd actually be nostalgic for a time when "race" wasn't a foul four-letter word, for a time when we could tell the difference between a "racist" and an educator in Arizona teaching a U.S. history course on the Chicano movement--for a time when we weren't such near-sighted hypocrites.
But really, no matter how much romanticized race-bilia I have hidden in that now dank and cobwebbed corner in the back of my mind inherited from generations before: I, the liberal spoon-fed child of the multi-culti '90s and the colorblind '00s, have never actually known a world that wasn't in debilitating denial, running away at breakneck speed from confronting stark racial inequalities and injustices.
We so ostentatiously and naively announced our new era of "hope" and the collapse of racial barriers like some imaginary Berlin wall. And now we find ourselves in a kind of self-imposed exile in this farcical Post-racial Wasteland. Yet we actually have nowhere to go "back" to-- nothing in fact, to take back.
Until this so-called post-racial society becomes a post-racist society as well, this wasteland will remain the nightmarish Twilight Zone we now find ourselves in-- populated by teabaggers with rabid gun-toting tendencies and Glen Beck & Co. followers.
With love and nowhere to send this back to,
TB
TB
