Let's reset...

I know I just talked about the Trayvon Martin murder yesterday, but I think that this topic warrants a continued discussion. About two months ago, I had written a length post about racial relations in this country, and the stagnation in the civil rights movement. I had written his, but then lost the text, and could not remember exactly what I wrote, and have not yet re-written it.
While I’m not going to re-write it now, I think the situation reveals a serious racial cleavage that we still have in this country. While the civil rights movement was transformative for this country, the so-called end of the civil rights movement fell short of anything resembling equality or the onset of some post-racial society. The civil rights movement opened the eyes of many people in this country, and did a lot to push forward equality for African-Americans and other minorities in this country; however, the mountaintop has not been reached. We do not live in a post-racial, equal society. We live in a society where civil rights have stagnated. And it’s this stagnation that further exacerbates the problems of racism, stereotyping, and profiling in this country; because people – mostly white people – feel that because the civil rights movement is “over”, then everything is peachy-keen. We’re done. We live in a country where racism, sexism, classism, sexual orientationism, and every other –ism are dead. BULLSHIT.
The civil rights movement was a great step forward, but we still have incredible discrimination in the country toward racial and ethnic minorities, toward women, and especially toward gay and lesbians. Rich, old, white men have held a stranglehold on this country for the last two and half centuries; and they’ve looked out almost exclusively for rich, old, white men. It’s time for these rich, old, white men to recognize that we no longer live in a country where they’re the only people that have anything to add to society. We live in a diverse society; diversity in intelligence, language, race, culture, gender, geography, sexual orientation, etc., and this diversity is a good thing. Their pushback is a Sisyphean task, and they will always be proven to be on the wrong side of history.