I came across two very different articles today which broached the issues of race. The first one was about Harry Potter actress Katie Leung saying that taxis drivers sometimes compliments her for her good English. (She was born in Scotland, by the way.)

The second one was about Hillary Clinton saying Republicans use “coded racial language” to oppose any Obama Supreme Court nominee.

Sorry. But in regards to racism, there’s nothing to see here – though you wouldn’t know it if you read these articles. You would think that both taxi drivers and Republicans are the most bigoted people in the world.

But all of this is, I guess, to be expected in our super polarized and super sensitive world.

Now, that said, I can understand that Leung gets tired of being looked at as an immigrant or an ESL speaker when she is a native English speaker. Sure, I get that. But a taxi driver commenting on a person of Asian descent’s decent English is not racism. Might have a smidgen of stereotyping, but it is not stating that one’s race is superior to another’s. This is an example of false cultural convergence – the driver thinking he’s running into someone from another culture when he actually isn’t.

Concerning the Hillary quote, she is, regrettably, adding issues of race into a situation where there isn’t any. This is what becomes tiring about politics – and both parties can be guilty of it – throwing our accusations and slight jabs to rile up the faithful into believing something that isn’t true. These kind of quotes are divisive and uncalled for. The issues surrounding the Supreme Court are tried and true political issues, not race issues. Not in any way. Period. And she knows it. But she still says it. This is about the Republicans being unwilling to waver politically in regards to replacing a conservative icon like Justice Scalia. And we all know, one-hundred percent for-sure know that if the situation was reversed, the Democrats would employ the very same delay tactics. It’s bad government, but it’s good politics. But it isn’t racism.

There are plenty of real racial issues in our world to deal with without us having to invent new ones.