I grew up in the seventies.
A peculiar decade to be young, because history still felt close enough to touch.
In our case, literally.
We lived pressed up against the Iron Curtain, so close that from our garden door to the barbed wire was barely an afternoon stroll. As children we rode our bicycles there in twenty minutes, perhaps less, as if pedaling casually to the edge of an empire.
Which, in a sense, we were.
That does something to a mind.
When a prison wall stands near enough to visit after lunch, freedom stops being abstraction.
It acquires texture.
Urgency.
Weight.
The Soviet Union breathing down our necks did not make socialism fashionable where I came from.
Quite the opposite.
You will not find many romantics of collectivist salvation among those who grew up in those borderlands.
We had seen the fence.
Heard the stories.
Felt the shadow.
That tends to cure ideological adolescence.
And perhaps because freedom felt precious, curiosity came with it.
Our parents—war-marked, practical, less intoxicated by theories than later generations—taught something remarkably simple.
Judge people by what they are.
Not what they look like.
Not what tribe claims them.
Not what category can be pinned to them.
A colorblind world.
An unfashionable phrase now, almost criminal in certain clerical circles.
But then it was simply decency.
There were not many Africans in Austria in those years.
So yes, seeing someone visibly different might draw glances.
Some curiosity.
Perhaps even a little provincial commotion.
But curiosity is not hostility.
Children stare at what is unfamiliar.
That is anthropology, not racism.
And in the moral universe many of us inhabited, skin color mattered astonishingly little.
Religion mattered little.
Origin mattered little.
What mattered—at least as aspiration and often as practice—was the content of mind and heart.
Imagine that.
A civilization once capable of such a primitive, radical standard.
Of course there were exceptions.
There always are.
Idiots are a renewable resource.
But they were exceptions.
Often frowned upon.
Embarrassments.
Not moral pioneers.
And if someone had told me then that race—race!—would once again become a defining obsession of public life, I would have laughed.
Laughed hard.
Absurd.
Ridiculous.
A bad dystopian screenplay.
You mean the thing we were trying to move beyond would be resurrected by educated people?
Not as pathology, but doctrine?
Impossible.
We were beyond that.
Or so I believed.
God, how wrong I was.
Because what returned was not the old crude racism everyone recognizes.
That would have been too obvious.
No, something subtler and perhaps more corrosive emerged.
Race re-entered through the servant’s entrance disguised as moral sophistication.
Identity as creed.
Pigmentation as metaphysics.
The individual, once central, demoted beneath group abstractions.
And now we are asked—quite seriously—to treat skin color as determinant.
Of opportunity.
Of guilt.
Of innocence.
Of career legitimacy.
Of social standing.
Of romantic propriety.
Even of who may speak about what.
As though melanin were destiny.
As though we had learned absolutely nothing.
The grotesque irony is almost too rich.
The people claiming to transcend racial thinking often seem incapable of speaking about anything except race.
Constantly sorting.
Categorizing.
Assigning moral meaning to ancestry.
Which, stripped of rhetorical perfume, sounds awfully familiar.
Only now bureaucratized.
Credentialed.
Therapeutic.
We once sought to make race irrelevant.
Now some seek to make it foundational.
Progress, apparently.
And I confess I find it astonishing.
Not because human folly surprises me anymore.
That faculty has dulled.
But because I genuinely believed this ghost had been buried.
I thought liberal civilization, for all its flaws, had at least secured that victory.
Apparently not.
Apparently old poisons can be re-bottled and sold as medicine.
Who knew.
Perhaps those of us who grew up staring at barbed wire should have known better.
Systems do not merely imprison bodies.
They colonize thought.
And new orthodoxies always insist they are emancipatory.
Until they aren’t.
Which is why I sometimes think the greatest betrayal of our age is not economic or political.
It is moral regression posing as enlightenment.
We had, however imperfectly, been moving toward judging people as individuals.
That was no small civilizational achievement.
To abandon it now—
for blood arithmetic and identity liturgy—
feels less like progress than a very old darkness dressed in academic robes.
And I still can’t quite believe we let it happen.