What follows is a post originally appearing on my blog, TomKnighton.com. Please feel free to come on over and check it out.
-Tom
Politics, particularly racial politics, is always a touchy subject. Racial politics in particular. All to often, we constrain our voices in fear that our opinions will be labeled racist. Many people see someone of another race accomplish something, or get a helping hand from someone, and it becomes easy to assume that race plays a factor either way. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Saturday night, the Knighton men had a “boy’s night out”. My father, myself, and my son all hit the Albany Panthers game at the James H. Gray Civic Center. It was a 71-6 pounding that I suspect the Greenville Force players will see replayed in their nightmare for years. The game was fun, mostly because with a 50-0 halftime score, we were hoping to bust the scoreboard and log in over 100 points.
All around us, people of all races embraced the team and the game and their fellow fans, regardless of race.
It was unusual, but not unprecedented.
In 1994, Albany suffered the worst flood in the city’s history. In the aftermath, people banded together to help out others in their community. White folks went into neighborhoods that they normally wouldn’t have gone into if they were paid to be there. Black folks helped out white neighbors that they normally wouldn’t even have spoken to.
As a community, we united together for a common goal. That’s exactly what happened on Saturday night, and what happened in previous years with the Wildcats. Perhaps the source of our problems isn’t racism, but a lack of a common goal that people can band together over regardless of race. Maybe, instead of talking about race, we should be talking about what common goals we may already have and unite together to work towards them.
President Obama has said before that he wants a national discussion on race. Here’s my side: White, black, red, yellow. Who gives a damn. There is only one race, the human race. The longer we pretend otherwise, the longer we will go on perpetuating old ideas. Events that unite us vary greatly, from 9/11 to the Albany Panthers. We need to develop these ideas intentionally, to unite us as Americans, Georgians, and Albanians. It’s the only way, as a community and as a nation, to move forward.
With a little luck, we can start putting aside skin color and start focusing on stuff that actually matters. We’ve need jobs. We have government involved in our lives in ways that our own grandfather’s couldn’t have imagined. We have some serious problems.
Someone’s skin color? Who really cares in the grand scheme of things?
