The Election of Obama Demonstrated that Racism Is Still a Huge Problem in this Country

Do you know that if you’re white (or whitish), there is apparently a pretty large segment who thinks it’s plausible you’d just grab a gun and say, “I’m going to go shoot me a black kid!” They don’t think of you as fellow human being with normal motivations they can relate to; they think of you as this inhuman, sociopathic monster. It’s insane.
For some reason, people are still stuck looking for the racist villains of 1960s and thus completely missing all the brand spanking new racist idiocy we have going on today. And since that racist idiocy is being ignored, it’s able to grow. The racism we’re dealing with today isn’t the racism of when the KKK walked around unopposed; it’s the racism of a country where a large majority elected an incompetent black man thinking that would solve everything. It’s a brand new stupidity that we haven’t quite categorized or understand yet.
Anyway, the motivations of Zimmerman were quite easy to understand if you cared to. He lived in a neighborhood with a lot of break ins and the police were ineffective to stop it. So he tried to help out, and when he saw a teenager he didn’t recognize, he confronted the kid and talked to the police. Now, you can question whether Zimmerman’s actions were sensible, but his motivations are very easy to comprehend if you’re interested in treating him like a fellow human being.
But no. A lot of people want to see him as this inhuman monster who just decided to murder a minority. They are bigots, and bigotry keeps them from seeing others as a human being. And these same bigots questioned everything about Zimmerman’s story while being really unconcerned about what led Trayvon to bashing a man’s head into the pavement. Because, again, they’re bigots; they’re not operating with rational minds.
But it’s not like I’m worried about getting discriminated at by these bigots; that’s not the big problem. Bigots hurt themselves more than anyone else. They’re locked into a cycle of hate and scared of the good people around them. They’re dysfunctional. And we are going to continue to have racist problems in this country until we take on not just the bigotry of decades ago but the new and rising bigotry we have today.
The election of Obama didn’t help race relations because the electing of him was racist. Someone like him would not have been elected in a colorblind society. One of these days we’re going to have to confront that.