In Vino Veritas?

August 1, 2009

Author’s note: In Vino Veritas means “in wine there is truth”...in Babylonian Talmud, “In Came a Wine, Out Went a Secret” is another way to describe most people’s tendency to get loose when they imbibe alcohol and to reveal their inner truth that they would rarely do while they are sober.

Obama, on Thursday, tried to laugh off all the way on the critical issue of “post-racism” in America by inviting two protagonists in the Cambridge incident in the White House for cold beers.

It was a typical attitude for most Black elites to avoid discussing racial issues, even when it is overwhelmingly evident and transparent case like this incident – a black professor being arrested in his own home for disorderly conduct simply because he talked back to the white police officer – that the racism in America is still an antagonizing issue even after Americans elected a Black their President.

The Kerner Commission Report established in 1967 by the President Lyndon Johnson after the Detroit Riot reported as follows:

“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white – separate and unequal. Segregation and poverty have created...a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.

What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain and white society condones it. Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear patters of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where riot took place or outside it.”

After more than four decades, could any politicians, black or white, dare to say that “the post-racist” America has transcended the institutional racism forever?
Does a confab over beer bring any truthful dialogue between two adults, white and black, who agree to disagree on the racism in America?
In a society where people live in a zero-sum relationship with other people – see their fortune as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people – blacks and other minorities are rendered invisible no matter how much havocs they suffer from the racial discrimination.

One thing is crystal clear: America has neither transcended the racism nor has developed into a post-racial society after the election of the first black African as their Commander-in-Chief.
Sooner or later, another racial imbroglio would force Obama to bus the table at the crow-eating party. What a pity!