Tamara Kelly
Staff Writer

Civil war could accrue if Obama elected for second term

Julian Bond, a civil rights leader, spoke at the Puyallup campus on Thursday, Oct. 18 about racism and its active and passive behaviors that are apparent even today.  Bond noted that racism is “absolutely parallel in the American experience.”

While racism is often thought of as individual behavior and individual actions, Bond went on to explain that it is a complex set of societal actions and attitudes that are both conscious and unconscious.

Bond used an analogy to help explain the difference in active and passive racism. Active racist material involves walking forward at top speed on a moving sidewalk. Passive racist behavior is standing still on a moving sidewalk, but the sidewalk carries the rider forward. Unless the rider turns around and runs backward faster than the sidewalk can carry him forward he receive the same benefits as the active racist who is racing forward at top speed.

“Unlike all the other ethnic variations of an all American theme, African-Americans remain the indigestible alternative; they refuse to agree to white supremacy,” Bond said. “And unlike the others, black ethnic vocalization has often been characterized and demeaned as identity politics, somehow democratically illegitimate, while white variants like: puritanism, The Confederacy, Klu Klux Klan, the Moral Majority, Tea Party and others are simply ordinary expressions of democratic activism.”

Bond said that race is a social construct not a biological absolute. It’s not like gender, which is determined by an X or Y chromosome and that there is no genetic marker for race. Most genetic markers are within racial groups, not between them. If race is insignificant biologically it has significance with in it culturally.

With the election of America’s first black president many burdens of racial stereotypes were thought of as broken, but an unrealistic pressure was placed upon Obama’s shoulders for racial tensions. Bond explained.

“With the views of Rick Perry and County Judge, Thomas Head suggesting an internal state war might be in the United States future if Obama is reelected again, shows that we are a country divided,” said Bond. “Both our response to the nations first black president and our response to the Civil War’s anniversary confirmed that we are still a country at war with it’s self, but we’re not the same country, we’ve gone from civil war to civil rights.”

Bond reminds us that while Martin Luther King was the face of civil right we must not forget that the civil rights was a display of thousands of blacks moving together for a purpose.

“It relied not on the noted, but on the nameless. Not the famous, but on the faceless.” Bond said.

The civil rights movement brought about change not just for black Americans, but also changed the way we contribute to making those changes, by sit-ins and voting.  It paved the way for other movements to be heard.