Today is the day that President Obama sits down with Professor Gates and Officer Crowley to have a beer and talk race, class and law. So, to celebrate this day, I thought I would offer a little background to this issue from my perspective. But first, a question. When is race an issue?

The short answer, it’s always an issue, even when it isn’t. The news about Professor Gates and Officer Crowley offers the perfect example of this apparent, yet ironic situation and shows the existence of two worlds. One that whites believe exists, and one that blacks know exists. What has to be realized is that everything is racial, even when no one is racist. That’s about as clear as mud now isn’t it. Let me explain.

We, white people, tend to think that since we may not be overtly racist, then nothing we do is racially charged. I am not black and will never claim to know what it feels like to be black, but what I can understand is that any situation that entails a white cop with a black man will innately be racially charged even though neither man is racist. This is because of the permanence of our nation’s history as well as its shadowy present racial abuses. All of this is represented with white skin. Add a badge, and you’re bringing all kinds of emotions to the surface.

(Think of it this way. Picture yourself growing up and living in a rural area with a pack of roaming wild dogs. Your parents warned you about them, you have seen your friends being bit, you’ve heard rumors of them mauling an adult male and you’ve been bitten as well. You now just fear the sight of them. You then grow older and move to another city. You are walking down to the mailbox and a pack of dogs come around the corner. How do you feel? This is a completely different pack of dogs, right? Could be harmless. But, does that matter? You’re immediately taken back in time when those dogs nearly killed your brother and you, so you start sweating, you get angry, you think about running. This is, I presume, a decent analogy of what it is like being Black in America.)

White America has committed a major sin in its post-slavery era. This sin is the belief of our nation’s innocence and the lack of ownership to our past human rights abuses. The fact is our history is neither innocent, nor is it over, and I truly believe white people should own up to the fact that we bear a burden of the evil that will exist as long as our history is that of slave owners and abusers of human rights.

This ignorance creates a duality for American society. There is the world that whites live in, and it is one of imagined innocence and historical blindness. We tend to gloss over what really happened, and what is happening, so we can feel guilt free and continue through our day enjoying this ignorance. And, then you have the world that blacks live in. This is the world that is all too knowing of our horridly abusive history, the shadowy abusive present and the depressing and very real possibility of an abusive future.

This duality exists because most whites will never see, nor desire to see, the world through black eyes because there is no requirement for us to do so. We run the government, run the banks, run the corporations and run mainstream American culture. Yet, blacks do not have the luxury of choice. They are forced to see the world through not only their own eyes, but through eyes of whites as well. Why? Because the two worlds are not equal. With whites running the country (current President excluded), we force the black community to fit our mold, talk our talk, dress our dress and act our act if they desire to have a piece of this “great” nation. This, from what I have been told, is common knowledge for all blacks.

When you are black and you meet the police officer, the loan office, the real estate agent … you have to put on your best white impersonation. If not, you are more than likely going to be denied any piece of the pie, or worse yet, pushed around or arrested. Don’t believe me? Let me put it this way. Take Barack Obama. Keep everything identical about who he is, but have him dress just slightly “funkier,” walk with a slight “swagger” and talk slightly more “black.” Would he be President right now? Of course not. Even though he would be the same intelligent, cultured and educated person, just with a slightly different façade, White America would have never voted him in. Why? Because we subconsciously, racially profile; we still fear that with which we do not understand, and we don’t understand black culture. And, it is our fault.

This ignorance of the struggles of being black in America, ignorant to the world in which they have to live, creates a bitterness and a level of resentment that whites will never understand because they can afford to live in their world ignoring this unfortunate and undeniably, unfair duality. To make things worse, this bitterness is oppressed and ridiculed if it is ever proclaimed. They will get punished, no matter the logic, no matter the constitution and no matter the law if they happen to speak out about these feelings in a public setting. One example of punishment is Reverend Wright. When he was caught on camera expressing his resentment of this inequality, he was smeared and called anti-American. How can whites expect there to be no resentment, no bitterness when we pretend that our past, our history and our present is innocent of any wrongs, or sins?

So what can we do? Take ownership of the human rights abuses that took place under our name, or watch. Until white culture owns up to its history and stops believing in the innocence of America, we will continue to have an unspoken tension between whites and blacks of this nation. Now that President Obama has taken office, I believe this will bring many issues to the surface that have been swept under the rug for many decades. This has the potential to force the issues that have needed discussion on a national stage for a very long time. Unfortunately, it also has the potential of being a very divisive issue and could be political suicide for President Obama.

Again, I believe it to be up to whites for any of this to be fixed. If we, white people, continue to ignore our past abuses of human rights, and current inequalities, we will not fix this racial rift between the two peoples, but gloss over it like we have done with so many other issues. We need to become more interested in Black culture and Black history. No, buying a rap album or voting for a black president does not make the problems go away.