Racism is dead: Long live racism

 We're going to stage an intervention. You know the kind. You show up, the chairs are drawn in a semi-circle and a Greek chorus of sad faces breaks the news to you in a way that crosses all the T's and dots all the I's in a salvo of much-needed truth telling: America? We, the people who love you the most, have something we need to tell you: Racism is dead.

There will inevitably be tears and much clutching of friends to bosoms. There will be well-worded ripostes that will deny this claim by pointing to anecdotal accounts of jobs not gotten, t-shirts with monkeys on them, and people who looked at you cross-eyed. But in the end, terribly hard though it will be, the conclusion will be reached that there is a problem but that problem is not racism, but our deep, deep, deep love for racism that is the problem.

A love that begins with/at the birth of Christ and our understanding that though history is written by the victors, the victim's story is so much more sexy. It makes more room for our foibles and our failures and seems more human. This is what made us make room for it in our houses in the first place. A not-too-taxing house guest that explained away failures to keep the place clean.

But it's gone far, far beyond that with our love of a process that produces congenital cripples and addicts being written, slowly but surely into our DNA the way only a good addiction can. Racism serves the left because it creates a permanently beleaguered common man whose cause constantly calls for common action, while at the same time supporting the dominant paradigm that, in this instance, Blacks, Latinos, Asians (and the list continues), are lesser thans who need the kind of help only a Kipling can offer. And, of course, racism serves the right in many ways but mostly because it cloaks its suspicions and fears with a proto-political cape of concern that really is just a cover to a resistance to power sharing.

We never said these addictions didn't make any sense.

But we were most surprised by our own. The Fourth Estate's absolute house breaking, TV-stealing junkie love for racism through this election season has been the number one reason why we've called this meeting. Sure Hillary may have started it, but the Fourth Estate was more than happy to carry and get carried away by the klaxon cries connected to Black and President. Previously only a Chappelle show bit, before anyone knew what was happening this went from an amusing Pete Seeger-Joan Baez possible fantasy to a strong-stone-cold-lock probability: we're going to elect a man for President who is what was called in the old days, a Negro.

And then, we guess because Iraq's toilet adventure and the sucking sound of 3 trillion dollars was too much to get our heads around, because infrastructure here at home is collapsing around our shoulders and because it's the heat and the humidity almost everywhere here now, we focused on something really important: getting as much racism in as possible. Aided and abetted by certain portions of the aggrieved groups that have made a steady living on this kind of trade (the race pimps), racism was packaged, bought and sold constantly to an America that though they didn't know they wanted to get high on racism thought they now must and, anyway, how much would taking just one hit (and inhaling) hurt you?

A lot, apparently.

Because traveling around the house of America like I just have on a book tour - Oklahoma, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Maine, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, Arizona, California, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington - it seems there are real people out there with real problems very few of which have anything to do with racism. Sure, sure, that's the patina that the addiction will cause you to spread over every nook and cranny of human endeavor but that doesn't make it so.

To be put another way: there are lots of reasons why someone else might hate you, but what you look like, is really the very least of them. So America's not about to have any Kumbaya moments any time soon. No, we're too paranoiac and steeped up on the possibility that we're addicted to racism to start loving each other unreservedly. But being apart and being comfortable being apart is only a problem when its supported by force of arms or grossly inequitable treatment and the way we see it, America, the only folks routinely getting the shaft over here are poor, which looks the same regardless of the hue, cast and religion of those involved: unhappy.

So for your sake, and our general health, we've come here today to try to do any and everything possible to get you off the pipe, because whether racism is our drug of choice or not, we still need our kids educated, our neighborhoods clean, our parents (and non-parents) gainfully employed, our sons and daughters returning from Iraq as whole as humanly possible to, the hope would be, not get shot by officers of the law, and liberty and justice for all.

Amen.