“These days ya can’t see who’s in cahoots, ’cause now the KKK wears three-piece suits…”

So Texaco has admitted it was wrong.

Well, if not wrong, at least they were willing to shell out $176.1 million in a race discrimination suit in the wake of the ‘black jelly bean’ incident.

Responses to this incident have ranged from shock and outrage to sadness and, worst of all, a knowing, resigned acknowledgement that perhaps American culture has not come as far as we would like to believe.

So how far has the collective mindset of the American people come in regards to prejudice? Alas, not very.

As Americans, we pride ourselves on being the bedrock of global democracy, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

We take comfort in the knowledge that we have provided a comfortable environment based on the liberty and individual freedoms of all its peoples.

Any injustices that our nation may have committed have long been rectified, or at the least, corrected to the furthest possible point of amendment. We’d like to think that. But in all honesty, that simply isn’t true.

I hate to keep picking at ol’ Bob Dole, but a comment he made concerning this very issue during the presidential campaign struck me like a thunderbolt.

Dole told a crowd of supporters that America had seen better days. America had been better than it was now, and “those who don’t believe it: you’re wrong, because Bob Dole was there.”

Dole’s efforts to kindle American nostalgia by citing the golden years of ages past rings false to anyone with a sense of history.

America’s proud history includes millions of deaths and generations of slavery for Africans brought to America.

After fighting for their ‘freedom,’ African Americans then were forced to endure Jim Crow laws and segregationist strategies aimed at their complete vassalage.

It includes the political and personal subjugation of women until well into the 20th century.

It includes the attempted and U.S.-endorsed genocide of an entire race that resulted in the near-eradication of Native Americans.

It includes discrimination policies against all of the aforementioned groups, as well as immigrants, Latinos, Jews, homosexuals and the poor.

This is a part of America’s history; indeed, it dominates much of America’s national policy such as Manifest Destiny.

But these incidents are all of relatively ancient history. What about more recent history?

Remember the illegal and immoral internment of American citizens during World War II whose only crime was being of Japanese descent.

Remember McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Anybody think the Civil Rights Movement occurred because minorities were pleased with the way their nation was treating them?

Yet, despite these and many other injustices, we continue to buy into the American Myth of the rugged and free individual.

Perhaps this is because, in 1996, we reach the assumption that our recent efforts to correct historical wrongs long left unrectified wipe the slate clean and level the proverbial playing field.

But obviously we haven’t come as far as we thought. The wrongs of the past we can acknowledge from a safe distance, taking comfort in the fact that we have no direct responsibility for the injustices committed hundreds of years ago. But the wrongs of today…

The Texaco incident, and other similar incidents of its kind that go undiscovered.

The absolute and uncompromising homophobia that concludes that giving homosexuals civil rights equates giving them ‘special rights.’

The continued abuse of women in our military and in households.

Workforce abuses in third world countries (I guess we can relieve ourselves of any burden or feelings of guilt since we’re abusing non-citizens).

Racist, sexist, classist hiring practices.

Our continued scapegoating of the poor while politicians and big business suck tax-payer money for ‘office expenditures’ and corporate ‘incentives.’

These and other injustices hit a little too close to home, so we rationalize and attempt to diminish the severity and significance of events, events that independently may reveal little of substance, but in the broader analysis reveal a dark and seedy underbelly of American society we pretend isn’t there.

People, including members of our university community, diminish the efforts of those attempting to affect change by saying that they’re out to “stir up trouble,” or that incidents like the Deantrious Mitchell affair were an elaborate plot of the BSAto… to do what?

We as a local, national and global community can never progress to reach the ideals of America as long as we continue to ignore and minimize the injustices that still occur all too often.

It’s not bleeding heart liberalism. It’s not the guilt of the well-to-do. It’s not a seedy conspiracy launched by muckrakers and godless heathens. It’s just common sense.

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Tim Davis is a senior in Theatre studies from Carlisle. He is the Opinion Page editor.