Festering Wounds

            Fifty years ago Dr. King gave his famous I Have A Dream speech during the famous Civil Rights March on Washington.  The speech was primarily focused on racial segregation and during his speech he speaks of segregation as a new type of slavery where "the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land". On the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, President Obama gave a very enthralling speech on how things have changed since the Civil Rights movement but mostly from an economic and moral perspective only lightly touching on the issue of Race in America.  In class we took notice that Obama did not make race out to be an issue in modern America.  Why?  I believe that he did not make race an issue because with the election of the first black president we are supposed to be in this "Post-Racial" America, and to state otherwise would have been a politically damaging decision to the President.  We all would like to think that race is no longer an issue in America but as Obama stated, it has been "noted,[that] black unemployment has remained almost twice as high as white employment (sic), Latino unemployment close behind. The gap in wealth between races has not lessened, it's grown." However I disagree with our Presidents decision because as we read in the Bonilla-Silva article, The Essential Social Fact of Race,  race in America has been institutionalized and will exist so long as we continue to practice it.  To simply ignore the issue of race and continue insisting that we live in this "Post-racial" society is an insult to the memory of not just Martin Luther King Jr. but all those people who stood at the forefront of the civil rights movement.  It is like a festering wound that refuses to close so long as we continue to deny its existence.  Those brave people did not march for equality so that minority schools in Chicago and Detroit could be closed down by the hundreds, while the Obama administration continues to deport thousands of illegal immigrants offering the chance of citizenship to only a few select people while putting immigration reform on the back-burner, and denying people in the American colonies of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands the same rights as the other 50 states.  Race is an issue and it is one that is deep seeded in the hearts and minds of U.S. citizens and its culture that is why Bonilla-Silva encourages us to not just acknowledge race but to discuss and critically challenge it.  The way I see it, we can only be in a "Post-racial" America once the issue of race stops becoming taboo and is taken seriously.