Issue date: 10/10/08 Section: Opinion

I hadn't felt this saddened about any so random a human happening for some while. Did this poster-child of human hatred really feel somehow justified or righteous or good in despising someone he's never even met? Did she sense creeping up her spine a chilling kinship with her ancestors, connecting with them in a painful way she hoped she'd never have to feel publicly? Will the fact that people still walk around broadcasting such misanthropy haunt her thoughts all day? All of her days? Did I just witness someone publicly losing her ethnic innocence? Does he still bear in his heart the same malevolence he vulgarly displays on his forearms? Or prayerfully, has it become a lurid badge of dishonor and shame, the ideological origins of which have faded within him as much as the dark message his arm still silently but forcefully conveys without?

I know this one man's pathetic pictographic manifesto shouldn't cause me to question the degree to which our nation has grown through or past the racial paradigms of the 1950s (or 1850s, 1750s and 1650s). I suspect that he constitutes a thankfully ever-diminishing minority here in Texas or anywhere else in America. And I trust that the fact that most of Obama's detractors could care less about his skin color and instead merely dislike some of his politics proves that as a culture, we have continued to distance ourselves from our historically more destructive race relations tendencies.

But that won't likely soon erase what I saw or felt this morning. A man's grotesque, antique tattoo ghostly echoing our all-too-recently shameful past, and in that present moment, witnessing it intruding on the consciousness of that young, black woman still sickened me to my core.

May heaven have mercy on both their hearts and mine, as I continue trying to shed the burden of my sole-surviving personal paradox: I'm only prejudiced against bigots.

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