Commentary: Race is still an issue for America

CNN.com
updated 9:36 a.m. EST, Wed January 14, 2009
By Susan Glisson
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Susan Glisson is director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, based at the University of Mississippi. It helps communities cope with racial issues and promotes research on race. Glisson is co-author of "First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America."

(CNN) -- As the inauguration of the first African American president approaches, the national news is full of race-related stories.
Rioters have been arrested in Oakland, California, in protest of an police officer allegedly killing an unarmed black man; the Centers for Disease Control report that Mississippi has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country, predominantly among black and Hispanic teens; and the journal Science reports that "many people unconsciously harbor racist attitudes."
Combine these issues with continuing demonstrated disparities in health care, education, housing and criminal justice, and it would be productive to admit the obvious: the election of Barack Obama did not end the America's problems with race.
It is important to note what has changed, due largely to the successes of the black struggle for freedom, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Because of these hard-won gains, the narrative that "if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be, no matter how many obstacles racism and poverty might place in your way," is now more appropriate than ever before.
A new generation of young people, for many of whom legal segregation is an almost unbelievable part of history, reached across racial and ethnic lines to help elect a president and even now work to engage in substantive community service wherever they live. iReport.com: A road trip 44 years in the making
Challenges, however, remain.
The U.S. Census notes that the United States will no longer have a white majority by 2050. Social Security payments for an aging white population will have to be paid by an increasingly brown and black work force, which may resent such support.
Clashes over immigration and tensions between blacks and Latinos suggest that we have much work to do to fulfill the vision of "a more perfect union."
While news media and the Internet often sensitize us to these issues, it can also often overwhelm us. It is important, therefore, to understand not only the potential obstacles we may face but also how we might respond to them.
Sherrilyn Ifill offers the most useful characterization of successful solutions in race relations in her book "On the Courthouse Lawn." Ifill argues that conversations on race are often stymied because they attempt to include the whole of racial history in one conversation.
Thus we try to discuss the Middle Passage, Jim Crow segregation, and Don Imus' comments simultaneously and therefore end up solving nothing. The most productive conversations -- and the ones that occur the least, Ifill suggests -- are local ones.

Full commentary: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/14/glisson.race/index.html