Two years back I did a story on Columbia University activists where I marveled at their colorblindness. The leftwing students did not actively identify, as Asian, Jewish, etc., all the labels with which I am obsessed. I had to drag it out of them. It was a point of pride to them to speak of their ethnic/religious identification as a childhood inheritance and not something they would carry into life.
We live in an era of diversity. I have many times announced that on this site. The idea came into the mainstream a year ago with the announcement that Obama was running a "post-racial" campaign. On Election Night, McCain made a lot of Obama's race in a celebratory manner, but Obama did not mention it directly.
Obama is more color-blind than I am. Yesterday I taught a class at the New School and I noticed that the kids seem invisible about a lot of these identifiers. I talked about my Jewish cohort in college 35 years ago and I felt like an old man.
Can I get with it? I put myself forward as the herald of this change, but in my eyes I am back in the old ways, I notice the differences. I place people in categories. My sister-in-law berated me about this last year. We were at the Philadelphia Cricket Club and I was asking her as I always do about Are there Jewish members? (Haim Saban's obsession too.) When are you going to get past this? she shouted at me. (She had a copy of Dick and Jane Do Yiddish. She loves Yiddish, her daughter goes to Shabbat services at her college, gets a Jewish beard to take her.)
I said, Kathy, the neoconservatives think about this stuff night and day and they got us into the Iraq war in part on this basis.
Look forward! she said.
Can I look forward? Am I going to measure myself forever by the feverish ethnic concerns of the neocons and that dustbin-generation? Can I stop seeing skin color and tags? Can I help the world heal itself of this madness and become truly diverse or will I continue to sow the seeds of racial division?
