WHY IT’S HARD TO TALK ABOUT RACE
One morning, back when I was on the San Antonio Express-News’s editorial board, we were discussing a new study on racial disparities in higher education. Three of us Bob Richter, Veronica Flores and myself we're thinking of writing columns about the study. We soon agreed that Bob should be the one to write it.
He laid out the reason why at the beginning of his column, saying that as a white male writing about race his views would be considered sound by some readers, whereas if I, a black male, or Veronica, a Latina, wrote the same column, those same readers would perceive us as whining.
Those readers being white
Bob knew that an important issue might be ignored based on who presented it. Through years of sorting through thousands of letters to editors as the Express-News public editor, he understood what Veronica and I also knew from decades of sorting through life: to be black or brown and bring up race, no matter how politely or obliquely, is to be accused of being too sensitive or even racist.
Of all the trip wires of controversial issues spread across the American terrain, none is more explosive than race.
When it’s said that Americans are uncomfortable discussing race, what’s meant is that many white Americans are uncomfortable discussing race. Being part of a group dominant in numbers and power means going through much of life without personally being confronted with the inequities of race and the indignities of racism.
But to be black or any person of color is to be confronted with race in sudden and subtle ways from childhood on; from the suddenness of the first time you’re called n word to the subtlety of being followed in a store or steered away from a neighborhood in which you’re considering buying a home.
It means thinking about race when you don’t want to and have long grown weary with doing so.
When I began writing a column for the Express-News in 1994, I made a conscious decision to avoid the subject of race for as long as I could, because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “black columnist” with whatever limitations that would come from having my ethnicity shackled to my job.
got the same question