Even with electing an African American as President we still hold our breath too long and watch each step too carefully.  It’s time we let our guard down and stop interpreting every statement and gesture in its most unfavorable light.  If we stop expecting bigotry everywhere maybe we’ll stop finding it everywhere.

Tell a joke about an ethnic group and immediately you’re a bigot.  If a member of that ethnic group tells that same joke, well, it’s simply funny and nothing more.  Use the “N” word and you’re a racist – unless you’re an African American.  Insult any ethnic group and you’re a bigot – unless you are a member of that group – then its just criticism. Oh, come on.  Get real!

We need to get past all these pretenses and we need to do it soon before we are eternally constrained by our own suspicious egotism.

Having elected an African American for our President, people of all backgrounds are going to be looking closely at each move for racial favoritism or “reverse discrimination.”  Suspicious whites will be examining his words, appointments, and executive orders for racial one sidedness while suspicious blacks will be seeing signs of possible betrayal if he doesn’t put their agenda out front and obvious.    His is a tough road ahead.

In the world of foreign affairs and American Diplomacy it will be no different.  As we disengage ourselves from two wars and concentrate on the real job of finding Bin Laden and  fighting Al Qaeda and other forms of terrorism there is another world out there awaiting our attention, the attention of the American Promise given tacitly in all we do and say.  Truth and most of all, Justice.

As the history books closed its pages on World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust became known to the entire world Jews and everyone else swore “Never Again.”  It was in that spirit – in some essence – that we “liberated” Iraq, took down a Hitler-like tyrant and propagated the American Ideal of Freedom (with a capital F).    We however ignore the real repeat of history and the Never Again is indeed happening again!  In Darfur literal genocide takes place this very day and the world knows about it – and does nothing.

I would think Jews everywhere would rise up to uphold their oath and Americans would not hesitate to “liberate” those people.  But wait – there is no oil there, and the people of Darfur speak not on the world stage, they have no voice that is listened to; as a people they are scattered and without the stentorian voice of other races.  They are merely a people who, before this, lived their lives quietly, peacefully.  

Our new President should turn the American ideal to saving the people of Darfur, stopping this real genocide.  How can we, as Americans, turn our heads to this and yet boast our ideal when we talk about liberating Iraq?

Oh wait!  Our new President can’t go rushing in to Darfur.  No President before him has and, since Darfur is in Africa and our new President is of African descent it will appear – well, it won’t look right.  

Get real America!  Put the concept of bigotry in your back pocket and keep it there.  Do not hamper this one man, this one great opportunity with these old pretenses.  But then, President-elect Obama is a very intelligent person and will make it work, of this I am sure.  He has to or we’ll fall back a hundred years and that we can’t afford.