I was reading

a book titled A Man's Life: An Autobiography. It was written by Roger W. Wilkins.

I remember seeing him in the news when I was younger and always liked his demeanor and how he spoke as well as what he had to say.

In his book, which was published in 1982, he wrote the following on page 366:

"The neoconservatives are spending a lot of time these days trying to convince us that America's racial problems are over...."

He wrote those words 35 years ago.

People who (consciously or not) uphold oppression have a strong interest in either denying that it exists or at least promoting the notion that even though it existed in the past...it's all fixed now.

Post-racial anyone? (by the way, the wikipedia entry says this term was first used in 1971)

Jeez.

It's really easy to determine whether the oppression of racism is "over". It will be over when the majority of those targeted by it say it is over. Folks who belong to the oppressing group don't get to say when it's over...only those targeted get to say that.

Many people (mostly we white-skinned ones) seem to have a real problem with understanding that harmers don't get to say when the harming is over...that power belongs to those being harmed. Maybe the problem is that the harmers are so used to having power over others that they think their power extends to being able to say when racism is over. Maybe that's part of their inability to comprehend reality.

Hmmm...

I was really struck by Roger Wilkin's 35 year old writing about neoconservatives...things don't change much in the minds of the deluded.

I don't much listen to folks who uphold the status quo anymore (I used to think they sometimes made sense) mainly because they never have anything new to say. You have to be connected to the flow of life and it's ongoing transitions to experience new things...harmers are static and frozen in their embrace of unchanging delusion, hence they learn nothing new and their messages are endlessly repeated (the wording varies sometimes, but the meanings don't). To believe them requires a well developed facility for forgetting that you've heard it all before.