Yesterday, the city of Portland, Maine, elected the first Somali-American mayor in US history. The only reason I knew about this was because of the fact that she is not a white person. As I typically do, I got to thinking. I’ve always heard stories about the first person of X orientation or Y gender or Z race to do X or Y or Z. The first woman to vote, the first Black president, the first Somali-American mayor. I’ve always wondered why we love to celebrate people for things that they can’t control. Maybe we celebrate them because America has a history of prejudice, segregation, enslavement, and general cruelty against all types of people, and a few specific people have broken the mold. Today I finally realized: we don’t.
We don’t love to celebrate them, we love to celebrate ourselves. We don’t love to celebrate people in the minority accomplishing things that are historical firsts here in America, we love to celebrate ourselves for “allowing” them the “privilege” to accomplish them. “Look at how far we’ve come! Look how hard of a choice it was for us to finally allow someone of color to run our town!” What were her campaign promises? What are her politics? What kind of a platform did she run on? I don’t know. The only thing I know about her is the color of her skin. The same will probably be true of the general population. This is the problem. The town is 90% White, no doubt the campaign trail was hard for her. She should be celebrated for winning the mayoral election in a town where she had no intrinsic advantage, but instead, here we are, patting ourselves on the back, “Look how progressive we are!”
When will we stop reducing people to their most arbitrary traits? Race is without a doubt, very real and very important. It affects everyone’s lives in myriad ways. But how you’re celebrated for your accomplishments? How you’re known by the general population? These things should not be on that list. We need to start congratulating people for the things that they can control, start congratulating people for the things that they did that they chose to do. That is the key to progress.