[SisterofJared]

Thanks for your response, Keith. I think you would have greater insight into this than I, since I am not in a racial minority. (Or not visibly, anyway. LOL. Like most American's I am a mutt.... have a touch of American Indian as well as possibly some black in me.)

I think that with time, racism is slowly being overcome. Our children are less affected by it than we were, and I think our grandchildren will be even less affected than our children. They say that time heals all wounds, and I think that prejudice is slowly being diluted, one day it will hopefully not exist at all.

But there are undoubtedly some rednecks around who fight to keep it alive.

I do see that there is more of class distinctions rather than race. For me, it is hard to see that minorities have it harder, because frankly my own family has always been in that lower income. I grew up in poverty and have struggled with it almost all my life. We had three years recently when we were not living in poverty, but that ended when my doctor made me quit work. I couldn't deal with the resulting poverty, and recently went back to work against his advice. Poverty is not fun. But for me I have always wondered why people think poverty is a color issue, since I am caucasian and always lived in poverty.

I think a lot of the struggle for black people economically has been to overcome the horrific effects of slavery. Why would they expect to have less babies out of wedlock, to have strong families if they weren't allowed to maintain marriages, if their families were torn apart by slavery and if they were expected to be breeding machines for slave owners? I do believe that those things are in the process of being overcome. How do make it happen when the rest of our nation is losing family values at the same time is beyond me. Studies show that more black people have homes without fathers present. But rather than helping overcome that problem... the rest of society is joining in.

Sorry, that is a bit of digression from the issue of is race still a problem. Evidently I'm hearing that it isn't causing the same tension, but that it still is an underlying problem.