Racial Strife Can Lead to Progress
Besides Garner, who died this summer when a police officer put him in an alleged chokehold after stopping to arrest him for selling untaxed "loosie" cigarettes, there was 18-year-old Michael Brown who was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, after a struggle.
More recently, a Cleveland cop fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a fake gun. Video of that shooting has run repeatedly on TV, along with the shooting of unarmed Levar Jones, 35, who reached into his car for his license too quickly in a Richland County, South Carolina, according to the officer, who has since been fired. Jones fortunately survived.
Is this why a narrow majority of Americans in a new Bloomberg Politics poll say they think racial interactions have gotten worse under President Obama? I think things only seem worse, especially to those who didn't want to face the persistent canyon of our racial and cultural differences.
Racial discord in my view is a lot like sex: We may not be having more of it than we used to, but we're talking about it more than ever.
In that way, we're learning more -- whether we intended to or not -- about how race is experienced by different people and families in our very diverse society. Part of the thanks goes to modern media that, depending on how they are used, can shed light or more heat.
But those who expect to reach a "colorblind society" without a lot of effort and occasional setbacks are, as Frederick Douglass -- one of the 19th century's most important African Americans -- said, are "people who want crops without plowing the ground." We have many miles to go before we reap.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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