From Salon: “It embarrasses them, they feel ashamed”: “Why America still can’t talk about race”

From Salon:

“We’re rapidly becoming a nation in which the majority will be people of color by 2043, but by the end of this decade the majority of children will be people of color, and by 2030 the majority of the young workforce will be people of color. As a nation, we have to come to grips with the fact that what happens to people of color in terms of opening up opportunity, making sure that people are ready for work, ready for leadership, ready to pursue their entrepreneurial skills — that the future of the nation depends on that opportunity being accessible and being taken advantage of.”

One of the things I often say is that if people of color don’t become the middle class there will be no middle class in this nation. Not only are we becoming a nation in which the majority will be people of color, but the majority of young people will be people of color. Right now, 46.5 percent of all children under 18 are children of color, but 80 percent of all those over 65 are white. The median age among white people is 42; the median age among Latinos, the fastest-growing population, is 27.

I do believe that many in this nation would like to get over racism. I think it’s one of the reasons that it’s such a hard conversation to have. People don’t want to talk about it. It embarrasses them, they feel ashamed, they feel that there’s nothing they can do about that that lingers once the legal barriers have been removed, but we have to see that removing those legal barriers did not create a level playing field. The extraordinary incarceration of black men is a scandal; the extraordinary poverty for black and Latino children is a scandal, so we have to keep talking about this so that we can get policymakers and leaders and the American people comfortable with understanding that the moral imperative exists but it’s an economic imperative now. If we don’t get it right, the fate of the nation is not promising.”

No laughing matter;

Read the full article: “It embarrasses them, they feel ashamed”: Why America still can’t talk about race

Ubuntu,

From Aspiring Humanitarian, Relando Thompkins, MSW, LLMSW

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