As the Nation Turns Its Eyes to Race for a Limited Conversation, Some Thoughts from Alameda County

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Jesse Douglas Allen-Taylor

Last week-just as I was in the middle of writing my column about the calls for Illinois Senator Barack Obama to go for a knockout blow in the Democratic presidential primaries-the latest round of national clamor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue was breaking. This was prompted first by Rev. Wright's appearances on Bill Moyers and his speeches at the National Press Club and the NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner, and then by Senator Barack Obama's follow-up press conference in which he broke, once and for all, with his former pastor.

And so, once more, half the nation seemed to want to talk about the issue of race, with the subject burning hot and heavy on blogs, in newspaper columns and on every national news and talk show. It was hard to ignore, but I did. I watched, briefly, the nationally-televised press conference where Mr. Obama declared that he was "outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle [created by Mr. Wright in his comments]." Then I turned back to the subject I was working on.

I have been deeply involved in the issue of race and America for all of my adult life, for many years as a full-time worker in the African-American Freedom Movement, also as a columnist for various newspapers in the Deep South and the West. I have spoken on the issue of race during those times when seemingly everyone in the country was talking about it, and I have spoken on the issue of race during periods when a majority of the nation wished it would simply go away. Race has often been the subject of previous columns. Almost always, I welcome a discussion on the subject.

But not this time.

In recent years, there has a developed a pattern to our race discussions. They tend to come when we hear someone say something on the issue that some large portion of the population finds outrageous-the comedian-producer Bill Cosby, Los Angeles Dodger baseball executive Al Campanis, oddsmaker Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder. Former United States Senator George Allen calling an East Indian volunteer of his Senatorial opponent a "macaca, or monkey, taken from the Belgian colonialist slur for Congolese. Or Rush Limbaugh saying he mistook Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villagarosa, a Latino, for a shoeshine boy. Or Mr. Wright.

I am not trying to equate the comments of these men, one with the other. I am only pointing out the fact that these days, we tend to talk as a nation about somebody talking about race, therefore, but not about the actual underlying issue itself.

Do you need examples? They are legion.

Late in April, while the Obama-Wright controversy was beginning to hit full stride, the Alameda County Public Health Department quietly released the executive summary of a study on health and social inequity in Alameda County.

In its opening lines, the health department's executive summary flatly, unemotionally, points out the grim realities of race and class inequities in our local community: "Certain groups of people in Alameda County are getting sick and dying prematurely from 'unnatural causes,'" the summary begins. "In Alameda County, access to proven health protective resources like clean air, healthy food, and recreational space, as well as opportunities for high quality education, living wage employment, and decent housing, is highly dependent on the neighborhood in which one lives."