The "Stop Talking About It" Solution

        In a 60 Minutes interview, actor Morgan Freeman claimed Black History Month to be ridiculous. I understand his view to be that confining his history to a month segregates Black history from American history and that they should be integrated.

Partial Transcript of Morgan Freeman's 60 Minutes interview as shared on Facebook

     
       Surprised by Morgan Freeman's rejection of Black History Month, the interviewer asks "How are we going to get rid of racism?"
        Morgan Freeman's solution is to "Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man." He has a point. If we do not make race an issue, if we do not distinguish ourselves as black and white and instead view each other as people, then race will not be an issue. However, I do not believe we are ready for this step. Thoughts and behaviors go deeper than speech. At this point in time, if we stopped saying my black friend and started saying my tall or clever friend, if we stopped 'diversity hires' and 'black scholarships', if we stopped counting and categorizing and reopening the wound, then race and racism would become taboo in scholarly circles but continue to run rampant in our preconceptions and behavior.
      We need to keep talking about race. The color-blind attitude will only be effective once systematic racism is toppled. A day may come when the color of an interviewee's skin is given no more thought than the length of his arms or the shape of his nose. A day may come when a lost child is equally likely to ask a black adult for help as any other nearby adult. A day may come when a woman describes the man she is dating to her parents and does not even think to mention he is not the same ethnicity as she is, just as she does not think to mention the color of his eyes or the size of his ears. But that day will not come about if we brush the pain, the past, the differences, and the dialogue under the rug.
      Say we topple racism. Say no ethnicity is statistically more likely to succeed or fail in a category than any other ethnicity. Say children no longer think the white doll is nicer, smarter, prettier than the black doll. Say the color of your skin is treated no differently that the flexibility of your toes or the fullness of your lips. Say racism is a thing of the past, a history term on a chapter test that half the students will forget because it is not significant anymore. Should we allow that? Should we let the differences, the beautiful variety of culture, the heavy history struggled through, slip away into insignificance?  I believe in recognizing differences, accepting them, and celebrating them. I do not claim we should celebrate skin tone variation for its own sake. I claim we should remember the positives and the negatives of an ethnicities history. Remember triumph after triumph against persecution and ignorance. Remember vibrant cultures kept alive despite horrific circumstances. Remember too those horrific circumstances and the ridiculous preconceptions that continue to stalk the only technically free men and women.
       I take Morgan Freeman's solution as a useful way of handling interpersonal relationships. At work, do not think of that one coworker or that one client as the black one. However, as a society we must not stop talking about it, we must not forget, we must scream at the monster of racism until it is taken aback and stumbles, we must rally the members of the human race to pin down and dissect this monster that we may understand it and never again allow it to control us.