Voters are still pessimistic about race relations, even in a post-racial presidency.
A Rasmussen telephone survey conducted between Oct. 4 and 5 found that only 36 percent of voters think race relations are getting better, while 27 percent of voters think relations are getting significantly worse.
When President Barack Obama was elected, many people were ecstatic; after all, America had finally elected a non-white president.
America became obsessed with Obama‘s race, insisting that his victory had finally propelled America into its first “post-racial” presidency.
This false hope is part of the problem that has influenced the findings in this Rasmussen telephone survey. Many Americans suddenly placed the Obama administration on a pedestal as being different from every other administration, insisting that because he was victorious in the 2008 election, society had immensely changed.
However, people in America are all still the same as they were before. Obama’s historical election didn’t change the way ethnicities view one another to the extent that they would go out of their way to improve race relations.
Even Obama has failed in his attempts to reconcile blacks with whites.
You may recall that less than a year into his presidency, Obama harshly criticized white policeman James Crowley and the Cambridge, Mass., police for arresting the black Harvard professor Henry Gates Jr.
Gates had been enraged after his arrest and claimed he was detained in part because of his skin color.
Although Obama retracted his statements and invited the two men to the White House for a beer, the damage had been done: Obama fueled a racial fire.
In addition, some liberals claim that Republicans who oppose Obama’s policies are bigoted — further playing the race card.
“This is about hating a black man in the White House,” comedian Janeane Garofalo said of the Tea Party.
People with this misguided way of thinking insist that anyone who disagrees with the president’s agenda do so because he is black.
This is, of course, not true, but it brings me to what I feel is the solution to the problem of race relations in America: putting an end to stereotyping.
America needs to stop thinking in terms of race.
In September 2008, the Associated Press conducted a poll that reinforced the negative ways in which whites view blacks.
This has to do a lot with stereotyping and how people of one ethnicity might make a hasty generalization regarding a person of another ethnicity. After all, we all have incorrect presuppositions.
Hasty generalizations are decisions based on little reasoning and are based on what the individual wants to be true or feels better about.
We need to stop making hasty generalizations regarding those who are different than us whether it be the color of their skin, the way they dress, or their sexual orientation.
Instead, we must understand that one individual does not represent his or her ethnicity or community as a whole.
Send your solution to spmccaul@asu.edu
