Chief's racial remark bares ugly sentiment

Dallas Morning News | Jacquielynn Floyd:

“Farmers Branch has declined to specify the remark the chief made, but KTVT-TV (Channel 11) said a department official who was present reported that Chief Fawcett said this: ‘As long as I'm chief, we won't have any [epithet] working in Farmers Branch.’ Which, if accurate, makes this more than a linguistic slip committed in a private setting by a combat veteran who was accustomed by the times and circumstances to using it many years ago. It suggests that he may have in the past and would in the future illegally deny employment to an entire group of applicants. How many qualified people might thus have been cheated out of a fair shot at a job with the Farmers Branch Police Department?”

Ed Cognoski responds:

There's a bright side to this ugly incident. A couple generations ago, it was common for people in official positions of power (mayors, police chiefs, governors, senators, etc.) not only to hold racist beliefs, but to express those beliefs freely, not only in private, but often in public as well.

Today, many of those power holders still harbor racist beliefs, but society no longer accepts saying so out loud, either in public or in private. Chief Fawcett learned that the hard way.

Give society another couple generations. Those in power in that future Utopia will have been raised in a time when racist sentiments are not even heard out loud. Whereas their grandparents may have been overt racists; their parents may have been closet racists; they themselves will have a chance of reaching adulthood without being infected with that vicious disease. OK, maybe Utopia is the right word for that unlikely outcome. Like the flu virus that continuously mutates, racism is a disease that keeps reappearing each generation in new forms. But from the way the recent breakout of the disease in Farmers Branch was handled, society can take some comfort that we now have to deal only with isolated cases, not epidemics. And that's reason for optimism.