Here’s the thing. Talking about racism doesn’t make you a racist. But that is what the right tells us on a regular basis.

I find it incredibly frustrating that the conservative right never stops complaining about how minorities complain about racism. I guess being white, and rich, and never having been denied a job, never having had people cross the street to avoid you, never having had someone mistake you for the “help” when you are one of the guests, not knowing anyone that suffered from police brutality or false arrest because of their skin color, somehow makes all these people experts on racism. And in their expert experience, because the Obama’s are in the White House, it A): proves that racism no longer exists; and B): proves that blacks are racist.

I can tell you that even within the past ten years I’ve seen plenty of racism. I’ve seem name calling, stereotyping, and people saying that someone wasn’t qualified for a job because of the color of their skin. I’ve heard people express opinions about someone’s criminal status solely based on the color of a person’s skin.

The most beautiful thing to me is that when Michelle Obama made her recent graduation speech at Tuskegee College, she finished by saying, “They are not an excuse to lose hope. To succumb to feelings of despair and anger only means that in the end, we lose.” She was giving the exact message the right always complains that Obamas and other minorities in positions of power don’t say. But no one on the right is recognizing her for that. They’re just whining about her playing the race card or being a racist.

You can never erase the way this country has treated blacks and minorities. We can’t erase slavery, segregation, discrimination, Jim Crow laws, judicial injustice, or anything else. It will always be there. We can all hope that someday, racism will be a thing of the past. But it isn’t yet. As long as people are calling blacks that speak out against racism “racists” for standing up for themselves, we’ve got a pretty big problem.

The conservative right seems to think that if minorities just stop talking about racism, it will go away. It doesn’t work that way. We got to where we are today by those being discriminated against speaking up, and those of us seeing discrimination taking place also speaking up.