by Dallas Spires

Created on: October 08, 2009   Last Updated: October 09, 2009

What is it with you people? You racists, that is.

Granted, I haven't been around for all that long, but it really puts things in perspective when I think that in my lifetime, the federal government has had to force several states to observe Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. We all saw the first African-American president get elected, and we all know people who voted either for or against him based solely on race. We remember the racially-charged dialogue surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

I'm white. I was born and raised in the South, where I still live today and where I'm raising my own son now. As a child, it seemed that everything was about race. The earliest friends I remember were two African-American girls who lived next door. Then, there were the black kids at school. The whole time there was an odd tension, as if being cool with each other caused problems around us. Things changed, of course, once we reached middle and high school. Then, the issue became how we were segregating ourselves, though no one did anything about it.

At some point, race magically faded into the background. We all just became kids. There were a few here and there who didn't like other people, but for the most part, we were all just kids with simple differences. Then came college, and it seemed like everyone was blind. When race did come up, the attitudes were strange to me. It seemed that the whites I knew were overly sensitive, and the blacks didn't seem concerned at all. WTF?

Upon returning to the real world, after living in a dimension where the race part of race relations had all but faded into obscurity, I was shocked to see that the race issue had grown worse.

With the election of our most recent president, it seemed that our nation had grown to a surprising stage of maturity, but instead it seems we've simply reached a point in the racial history of our country where the race issue must be faced head-on before we can move forward.

From the black side of the fence, you hear a lot about the days of slavery and a pretty good bit about disenfranchisement (remember when that word was popular on the news?). From whites, you hear a lot about affirmative action, ethnic scholarships, and BET. No, there aren't any cultural differences between blacks and whites. Blacks want to know why the drug war targets them. Whites want to know why they're worried about it. Blacks want to know why there seem to be more liquor stores in their neighborhoods. Whites don't understand why minorities

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