In all my years writing articles, I never get as strong a reaction from readers as when writing about race in the drug war. After publishing an article on race, my inbox clogs with strongly worded emails from readers whose reactions range from euphoric to aghast. No other topic earns as many “unsubscribe” clicks from the NCHRC group email list. What is it about the racial element to the drug war that makes some people so angry?
In exploring this topic, I thought I’d share a little about my own upbringing and journey toward my current beliefs about racial justice. There once a time when I too might have been angered by any article with the words “white privilege” in the title.
I was raised by a loving family in a white middle-class home. We didn’t talk much about racial issues, but I never heard my parents utter an unkind word about any person of another race or class. I was taught to treat everyone with respect and kindness. We traveled a lot and I was encouraged to value other cultures, religions and ways of life.
But there was one subtle lesson I picked up about race. I remember my mother looking at cereal boxes that displayed smiling children of different races and saying with a slight frown, “that’s so politically correct” or “PC” for short. I remember watching a movie with my family in the 1990s and hearing my parents mutter something about political correctness when they saw Morgan Freeman, a black man, as the film’s president. I remember bringing home my high school history textbook and seeing my mother tense upon flipping to the very end of each chapter, where there was a small, separate section on black history and women’s history. “So PC,” she sighed.
Interestingly, at the time it never occurred to me that my parents’ irritation with political correctness had anything to do with race. The enemy was not people of other races, but politicians forcing political correctness down our throats. The problem was the people obsessed with identity politics, their insistence on splintering us into fragments instead of emphasizing and embracing our commonality. It was better, my parents and I believed, to simply judge all people on merit, regardless of their inclusion in a particular minority group.
