It's fair to say that 2014 has been the year America's melting pot boiled over -- again.
With racially charged deaths in Ferguson, Mo., and Cleveland, Ohio, and Staten Island, N.Y. -- all coming on the heels of the Trayvon Martin killing in 2012 and George Zimmerman's acquittal in 2013 -- we have heard calls for America to finally have "a conversation" about race. The conversation we have been asked to have time and again since police turned dogs on protesters in Birmingham in 1963 and since the National Guard put tanks and rifles on the streets of Memphis in 1968.
Conversation? Hardly.
Our country -- built on racism and free slave labor from the mid-1700s until the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 -- has not been and will not be fixed with a simple "conversation about race." It will not be fixed with dozens of conversations about race.
We've had the conversations. We talk about it all the time. What we don't do is act on those conversations about a handful of all-important words in our Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
We talk about it plenty. But here in 2014 are some stark unequal facts:
* The black poverty rate is about 25 percent, compared to 11 percent for whites, and even in the middle class populations of both races, the recession was unequal. From 2004 to 2010, whites lost 1 percent of their wealth, while blacks lost 23 percent and Hispanics lost 25 percent, says the Urban Institute. The average white family has about six times the wealth of the average black or Hispanic one.
* Black drivers are three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as white drivers. Black offenders receive prison terms 10 times longer than white offenders charged with the same crimes. A third of all black men are going to prison during their lifetimes. Imagine those statistics in reverse.
Now also understand that the racial dynamics of America are changing in a way that makes some whites uncomfortable. Whites are 63 percent of the country's residents, down from 80 percent in 1980. The nation's 54 million Latinos outnumber its 42 million blacks. There is a growing population of Asian-Americans and bi-racial Americans. And the same country that in the last generation created huge barriers to prevent African-Americans from voting is now one where in 2012 a higher percentage of blacks voted than whites.
Conversation about race? How about acceptance that the plantation is gone? How about an acceptance that our elitist and arrogant dream of white royalty is unworthy -- and doomed to fail not just a minority race but all of us.
Some new numbers from the Public Religion Institute really put the lipstick on this pig of an all-talk-no-action conversation.
The new study found that three in every four white Americans, 75 percent, don't have a single minority friend. And an average white person with 100 friends only has one black friend, one Latino friend, one Asian friend, one mixed-race friend. An average black person with 100 friends has eight white friends. Sixty-three percent of blacks surveyed admitted to having no white friends compared to 46 percent of Hispanic Americans.
Many of us believed the election of Barack Obama brought us to a "post-racial society." It didn't. Many Chattanoogans were shocked and dismayed last year when Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond cited Obama's race as the reason gun sales were up and people had become hyper security-conscious.
"Part of it is [the] first black president. We all see that. We may dance around it, but a lot of people are fearful ..."
Hammond said the mentality of fear he was seeing was "an Old South thing," left over from the days after the Civil War when "carpetbaggers" from the North came down and took advantage of the reeling, damaged South.
Slavery is dead. Carpetbaggers are dead. If Jim Crow is dead, his ghost is alive and well.
Certainly there is progress. Just not enough.
Franklin McCallie, a 74-year-old descendant of the founders of McCallie School here has for years admirably been making his home a meeting place and racial friend maker.
McCallie -- and certainly other Chattanoogans and Americans -- know that exposure, interaction and friendship are powerful tools against fear.
But to move forward, our polite meetings and conversation must stop.
We and others should stop just talking about it and go completely color blind.
Let's take off our training wheels, and put racial divisions behind us.