The Return of Racism

If the picture above bothers you, read the following from Raw Story:

Two high school students in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been suspended after they posted a photoshopped picture of a black classmate surrounded by Ku Klux Klan hoods on Snapchat.

...Local news station KOB 4 reports that the students posted the photo on the school’s official Snapchat group, where it was seen by several other students before being removed.

...The two students, who claimed that they only posted the photo as a “joke,” were suspended from school for ten days. Additionally, one of the students was kicked off the high school football team.

After the Charlottesville rally, this begs the question what is causing this upswing in the KKK and other white supremacist groups?

For most of my life, I can honestly say that most of the racism I saw was far and few between, usually limited to offhand remarks by people whom I never realized were racist. What could make young people think racism was suddenly ok?

While many in the media might point to President Trump as the cause, Trump hasn't said anything even remotely racist (no, his response to Charlottesville wasn't racist). On the other hand, Trump's anti-PC quality, in combination with his successful election, has certainly opened the door to a cultural questioning of racism.

54 years after Martin Luther King Junior's "I Have a Dream" speech, his dream is still not a reality, specifically:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

In this day and age, thanks to media racism, skin color is more important than character, especially when that skin color is black. If you don't believe that, then ask yourself: If Barack Obama was white, would he have been elected president? And yet, in a cultural "affirmative action", he was elected, twice (although I blame the Republicans for his re-election, as Mitt Romney was the second worst candidate in my lifetime, behind only Hillary Clinton).

On top of this, white supremacist groups are getting more media coverage than ever, which reminds me of the old saying, "There is no such thing as bad publicity." In a world where political correctness forces white people to hate themselves for the injustices they performed to blacks, from slavery to Jim Crow and other institutional racist acts, even though none of them ever experienced or even caused such racism, it leaves a generation of young white people to seek ways to feel better about themselves. Some of them see these white supremacy groups on the news, and it makes them ask questions.

Sometimes, pendulums swing too far.

Before we return to the racism of the 1960's, we need to return to the words of Martin Luther King Junior. We need to elevate content of character above color of skin. The sins of the past need to be forgiven, completely, as the last purveyors of Jim Crow-style racism are dying off. For as long as we continue to "hate the haters", how can we ever hope to move past racism?