Working to get past color of our skin

Martin Luther King Jr. famously asked us to focus on the content of a person’s character and ignore the color of their skin. Obviously, in our country and elsewhere, that is easier said than done.

People tend to extrapolate from discrete, isolated incidents some larger narrative about how much more racist we’ve all become. The problem is, for every documented hate crime, there are at least as many fake crimes that are committed by the very people who claim to be targets of the hatred.

I abhor bigotry, in any form. I have been the target of it, and have dealt with it in my immigration practice. I have gone to protests against draconian moves by the Trump administration against refugees; I have visited detention centers where inmates are treated as less than human; and I have written, and spoken, and argued in court about the indignities that people commit against their brothers and sisters.

But I am not blind. I know that hatred will continue to exist unless we look at it with a clinical eye, unclouded by personal prejudice and partisan bias.

But here’s the thing: sometimes, color is irrelevant. I know that is heresy to some of the professional race-baiters who make their living dividing us along the color lines, people like Al Sharpton and pretty much everyone who draws a paycheck from CNN. But the truth of the matter is, sometimes, things happen and race is irrelevant. So, when that dogeared race card is pulled out whenever someone of color happens to be criticized or does something wrong, that pushes us back farther away from the place where we can find common ground.

I’m thinking right now of the most banal of situations, the royal saga of Meghan Markle and her prince, Harry Windsor. This week, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced that they were stepping back from their royal duties, although apparently not from their royal paycheck. This came as no surprise to observers who have watched as American Meghan has imposed her will on an institution that has survived pretty much everything that has happened since the Magna Carta. It is having a hard time surviving her, though.

Meghan has wanted to do things her own way, which is fine if she were living the happy single life in L.A. But she chose to marry into the most storied royal family in history, and when she did so, she understood what was required of her.

To be blunt, I think Meghan is the problem here. You can disagree with me, and many do, and that’s fine. What you cannot do is get up on your high horse and start pointing your fingers and telling me how racist I am to be criticizing a bi-racial woman.

The simple fact is that you can criticize someone of color without harboring bigoted feelings. You can simply believe, as I do, that the person you are criticizing has a mediocre character.

Another thing that you can do is suggest that giving two years probation to a young black man named Michael White who stabbed a young white man named Sean Schellenger in the back and left him to bleed in an alleyway is an abomination and a miscarriage of justice, without being considered racist because of White’s skin color. White was acquitted of a voluntary manslaughter charge in the deadly confrontation, but convicted of tampering with evidence for throwing away the knife. He killed Schellenger, and the only color that mattered there was red, the color of the dying man’s blood as he fought for his life.

It is amazing to me how people rallied to the defense of the killer, who was black, merely because he was black. It is an abomination, nauseating, and the people who did this are beneath contempt.

This is a much more serious situation than the trials and tribulations of that bi-racial duchess, because in this case, an innocent man lost his life and his killer is free.

Racism is a two-way street, despite what some activists will tell you. And the racism is seen in subtle ways, as I showed in the above two instances.

My point is that if we are ever going to get to a point where that “content of their character” thing is ever really going to be put into practice, we are going to have to stop excusing and defending colorblind mediocrities, like Meghan Markle and Michael White, based on what they look like.