MEADOR: Racism not dead in American policy, consciousness

There's a funny thing about seeing yourself as superior to everyone else. Since you're not perfect, you're going to make mistakes. And when you do, you have two choices: admit that you're not as great as you think and deal with the imperfection in all its messiness and brokenness, or attempt a surface-level quick fix that doesn't ultimately solve anything but allows you to preserve your myth of superiority.

On the question of race, the United States has always opted for the latter. And as we commemorate Black History Month, we'd do well to remember that. As evidenced by the absurd and hateful response to the presidency of Barack Obama, racism is still a significant problem confronting our country. We are not post-racial, we are not colorblind. If we were, conservatives wouldn't make remarks about the Obama presidency proving once and for all that affirmative action is a failure. (For that matter, we wouldn't be passing ridiculous bills like last year's Proposition 424 banning affirmative action.)

Rather, we have simply perfected the art of obscuring our nation's perverse racism by draping it in a veil. And when one veil starts wearing thin, we wrap it in yet another. The end result is that the ugly underbelly of our society remains largely unchanged, even if a superficial analysis might suggest that we've made progress on this contentious issue. Time after time America has had to choose between dispensing with the tired myth of American exceptionalism or dealing with our many racial sins. Invariably, we pick exceptionalism - even if the rest of the world stopped buying that myth long ago.

The process began in 1776 when it was important that we present ourselves as an oppressed, trodden-upon people, rebelling against the overseas tyranny of George III of Britain. Never mind the fact that the taxes really weren't that absurd and that our legal argument was very weak within the British legal system. We were an oppressed people, damn it, and we weren't going to take it anymore.

So we pen the Declaration of Independence and talk all high-minded about all men being made equal. Never mind the fact that the author of those words owned slaves (and carried on a sexual relationship with one of them).

Then over ten years later we create the Bill of Rights and go on talking about liberty and equality. Meanwhile, below the Mason-Dixon Line African slaves were treated as property and north of it they were seen as savages in need of a good bit of "Christianizing."

After the Civil War we add a few amendments to the constitution, further "proving" our commitment to equality. Thirty years later one of those amendments became the basis of Justice Henry Billings Brown's opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that the Constitution allowed for "separate but equal" schools, train cars and the like.

Yet somehow we were still "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Then the coup de grace comes in the form of Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court case that overturned the Plessy ruling of 50 years prior. Surely this proved that the United States was finally willing to fulfill its lofty promises to its nation's non-white population?

Sadly, no.

Brown v. Board came within the context of the Cold War. Namely, at a time when the USA was keen to look progressive on matters of race so as to earn the approval of non-aligned, newly-created nations in Africa and south Asia. In the crucial west African nation of Ghana, the Ashanti Pioneer reported on southern racism calling it "a daily disgrace to the United States and all humanity."

What's more, the American policy makers knew that domestic race relations affected foreign policy. In an April 1957 report to President Eisenhower following a trip to west Africa, Vice President Richard Nixon said, "We cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality in the United States. In the national interest, as well as the moral issues involved, we must support the necessary steps which will assure orderly progress toward the elimination of discrimination in the United States."