Let's be clear about the effect of the racism directed against President Obama and his family

[bigtree]

56. thanks for that perspective, Joe

You laid it out very well. I grew up in a white suburb outside of D.C.. We had fled the city in '69, about a year after the riots and looting turned our proud, black middle-class neighborhood into nightmare of broken glass and smoldering brick.

The suburb was quiet and green, in comparison and the folks were unfailingly polite; at least the ones who would talk to me. See, I didn't really catch on to the social dynamics which directed many of the relationships and experiences I had, and the ones I wanted but couldn't attain. There were homes of friends who had parents who wouldn't allow me to visit, or whose children were afraid to have me over because of how they thought their parents might react. But it was just about a decade or so that it was allowed to flourish behind those closed doors. It was coded and undercover.

To a great degree, it still is, but we are generations-removed from the stigmas and prejudices that were taught and bred into us. We had our own defensiveness which made us lifelong allies of civil rights. In fact, in my parent's generation, many of the opportunities were in civil service as the influx of more blacks into the workforce required supervisors and managers who were seen as the most effective or most convenient stewards of the still segregated workforce.

We really didn't begin to have open debates about race and discrimination in wake of the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr.. The government was moving along though. My father, in fact, helped interpret and implement many of the new anti-discriminatory laws for the federal workforce during that period. But, there was definitely a hesitance to speak of the continuing discrimination and many institutions were still allowed to erect barriers to employment and advancement until the federal government got up to speed and the politics brought visibility to the issues of race. That's where Jackson came in; highlighted by his very visible run for the Democratic nomination. He actually got that role by default. There wasn't anyone willing or able to promote their own activism like Jesse Jackson was, and he had a lot of success in jump-starting the debate about race.

That debate, the efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, redistricting, and the progression of the new anti-discriminatory laws and the increase in enforcement; affirmative action and the debate surrounding that, Clarence Thomas . . . all of these things made their way into the broadening media and caught fire and wind.

Then came this new generation. My kids' generation. They just ignored all of the fighting between adults, and, for the most part, united. It was as fast as the period between 1980, where I had trouble getting folks to look at my job application (much less give me one), to 1985, where an expanding economy was more than willing to take as many of the new generation of minorities who had the benefits of wider educational opportunities and were ready to fit into management positions which were, for the first time, in many businesses, supervising what was still a majority white workforce in many parts of the country.

All of that put the racism out of fashion and drove it underground. Why is it resurfacing? I think it's a basic ignorance of the past. History has been obscured by a need to put all of it behind us. Folks are now forming some of the very same notions that we spent generations putting to rest. I think it's going to be a matter of vigilance. We have to teach and set our own examples. We need to have zero tolerance for those little and large instances of racism, racist talk, scapegoating, stereotyping. And it's a multi-ethnic task these days; even reaching to instances of gender and sexual orientation issues which are also targets of folks who haven't yet gotten a clue, or folks who have yet to be confronted by individuals or by short-sighted laws that don't recognize those rights.

Vigilance. That's something we need to make a generational effort. This presidency offers us an opportunity to teach and learn. So refreshing to read perspectives like your own here and to know that folks are considering these issues out in the open.