Martin on racial cowardice

Correspondent Melvin Martin writes about how racism against Indians has affected him personally:I just hope that my daughter, who turned two years old this month, will not have to experience what I have gone through as an American Indian person in this society.

These were my thoughts and feelings when I first became aware of the following recent statement made by the new Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder:

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," Holder said at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. "Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”

As a Lakota man, I truly hate to be accused of cowardice by anyone, especially by one of Washington’s elite class, hence, my own attempt to evade this bold accusation of harboring a profound fear of talking about my own personal race-related issues:

For the longest time I chose not to start a family because I did not want to bring another Indian child into this particular vale of tears that we as Indian people have been so horribly subjected to throughout our lives. I, in the darkness of my own sickness as to race in America, waited until I met an Indian woman who was "sufficiently" light-complexioned enough so that the children that we would have would not be made to feel inferior as a matter of degree in terms of coloration. I know that many blacks seek out mates who are of a lighter skin color with the reproductive objective in mind that the less dark their mates are, the less racism their offspring will experience.

My little girl’s mother is from a tribe in the Great Lakes area and since she is Ojibwe, French and Lithuanian, her racial admixture is such that she strongly resembles the actress Kate Beckinsale (with a slight Asiatic quality to her eyes and cheekbones) and I thought that any child we would produce would take after her. But no, my daughter looks more like me and I am close to full-blooded with a fairly dark complexion. I know that this type of reasoning may seem like a very peculiar obsession, but to be totally honest, I have been plagued by deeply rooted and intrusive thoughts as to the nature of race in this society all of my life. At any rate, my daughter is here and I have extremely high hopes that by the time she goes off to college that most of today’s “old school” racists will have died off--and she will not have to suffer through life as have I and so many others.

I challenge anyone who reads these words of mine to fault me as to the violence of this particular perspective on race in America as it has influenced my heart and mind.Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Harm of Native Stereotyping:  Facts and Evidence and Highlights of the US Report to the UN on Racism.