Today, the Supreme Court issued an important ruling about
the Voting Rights Act. This Act was hugely important in the days of the civil rights
era, insuring equal access to the polls for a population that had been denied
it for too long. With the Supreme Court’s
action, we are left to hope that things have changed enough that those
protections are no longer necessary. Surely,
we think, we as a nation have moved beyond those days.
And yet . . . in another courthouse in another state, a
racially-charged criminal case is going on as I type. Was Trayvon Martin shot purely because he was
a young black man in the wrong neighborhood, or was he shot by someone acting
in self-defense?
And yet . . . shooting targets that bleed and look
suspiciously like our President were being displayed at a convention just last
month. Are the strong feelings that many
bear towards Obama born out of racial hatred, or are they simply the dislike that
any president bears?
And yet . . . a popular food celebrity who makes food the
way that I think it ought to taste acknowledges having spoken disrespectfully of people of other races. Paula Deen’s recent publicity
demonstrates one version of growing up Southern. She grew up in a climate in which it was
somehow normal to use vulgar words for persons of a different race, or to tell
jokes where the punchline lay in the ethnicity of a character. When she acknowledged these things in open
court, she lost a job and at least one sponsor. Her defenders have said, among
other things, “Well, she can’t help it, it was where she was raised.”
I was raised in Georgia, too. Although I may have been raised in the same
state as Deen, I was raised in a different universe. I was taught at an early
age that it was “tacky” to use the n-word, along with the d-word and the
s-word. (Of course, I didn’t even know the f-word existed.) For a Southerner of
my universe, there was nothing worse than being tacky. Ethnic jokes, although a
little fuzzier, also fit along the spectrum of tackiness. I often forget to
thank my parents for their wisdom in raising me they way that they did, and I am
grateful for an upbringing that didn’t really seem that momentous at the time.
“Tacky,” of course, contains its own level of judgmentalism,
even without racial connotations. Face it, none of us have perfected the art of
looking at the world without filters of familiarity. Those who are different from us are going to
be judged by us differently, more harshly.
Have we evolved beyond the need for the Voting Rights
Act? I’d like to hope that the Supreme
Court’s optimism about human nature is well placed. However, if they are wrong, well then, their
decision would just be . . . tacky.
