Early this month I started my day just as usual: drinking a cup of coffee made of socially responsible organic bean, while trying to keep my 1-year-old from eating every inedible particle on the floor, and reading the only daily paper available to me, which is the Press Herald.
It’s only because I am a newshound that I keep reading that paper, which never seems to me to dig much deeper than the surface of a story. But, alas, I left a state whose chief city alone had two major daily papers, so what can a girl do?
Although the depth of news coverage still wasn’t impressing me, I did have to do a double-take on a page-one story of August 5, which proclaims that the state’s black population has doubled and that the state’s minorities are booming.
Wait! Stop the record! Hold the presses! Redirect my calls!
Diversity is truly here.
Well, um, maybe not. Or yes and no. Or whatever other ambivalent statement suits you.
Truth is, from 2000 to 2005 the state’s black population grew to 13,456 (or 1 percent of the population) compared to 6760 backs in 2000.
True, it doubled, but let’s not overstate things. That’s still not a lot of folks.
Also, it turns out that most of these black folks tend to live in either Portland or the Lewiston/Auburn area and that a significant portion of the growth is due to Somali and Sudanese refugees moving in.
Well, we are becoming an ever-more diverse state. That much is true. And from that standpoint, the newspaper editors thought a doubling of the black population was newsworthy. I guess I agree, though I’m not sure that some 6000 or 7000 people and a “jump” to 1 percent of the population is strong page-one material.
The sad truth is that we are still one of the whitest places in the land.
Even without that Press Herald story, I was thinking about this stuff recently at my night gig as a business instructor at a local career school, after one of my students who is barely into middle age actually referred to black people as colored.
Eyebrows twitching, I had to explain calmly why the use of the world “colored” is not acceptable. I admit my gut instinct was to get pissed, but really, it was a learning moment. Still, the fact that I had to tell an adult who was born after the start of the Civil Rights Movement why “colored” is outdated and insulting scares me a bit. It tells me that in the end, this “upsurge” in the black population really doesn’t mean much in and of itself.
Sure, any forward progress is nice, and every step Maine takes toward having a population that remotely reflects the nation is welcome. But I am reminded that the real problem, and maybe one of the reasons more non-whites don’t move here, is that people remain blissfully ignorant. Like the woman who recently innocently but annoyingly called my baby a “little monkey,” completely unaware that blacks have been derogatively compared to apes and monkeys since the slave days.
The bottom line is that if this state is ever to catch up with the rest of the nation and the global economy, people have got to start paying attention. They have to stop finding comfort in terminology and ignorant assumptions about other races that went out of vogue decades ago. Maine may be the “way life should be,” but that doesn’t get it off the hook for keeping up with the times.
