We’ve all heard or read it: “…in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” But who among you took it upon yourself to get past the initial wave of b.s. analysis and shock value by looking up Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech text for yourself, thereby placing the quote within its intended context? The man has a point – several, in fact. But if you’re not well-versed in the names considered to be, perhaps, the Washingtons or Lincolns of black history, then at the very least, realize that
the names of others of these people should strike a resonant chord in the historical ear of all in our nation: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Charles Drew, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Vivian Malone, Rosa Parks, Marion Anderson, Emmit Till.
Monday, March 23rd 2009 at 7:41 am |
@Travis,
I agree that the lack of understanding, and “trying,” is often mutual. And whether black or white, I don’t mix with co-workers on the weekends; I mostly spend my time with people who live near me, whose kids play with my kids. And not a lot of black people go to my kids’ elementary. Those who do, I hang out with them and their parents on weekends.
So getting back to Jim Knutsen’s [and the the rest of the world's] question of “what is racism,” I’d say that it’s NOT racist to hang out mostly with your own race on the weekend if that’s the way things shake out, as long as you don’t consciously engage in perpetuating the division. But the segregation that got us to this point over the course of 300 years from when the first African landed on the shores of America to be bought and sold as property to when the Civil Rights Act was passed, that got us to the point where many of our schools are virtually as segregated today as they had been for the previous 150 years, with the only difference being that it’s now by the choice of the people instead of mandated by Jim Crow, IS racist at its core, and I doubt we’ll see things change much more in our lifetime. Generation by generation, conditions and relations and institutions can change for the better with effort from everyone, and the mess that took America hundreds of years to get into may only take us 100-150 years [from 1965] to get out of.
Sunday, March 22nd 2009 at 10:18 am |
The cowardice is something belonging to both black and white. Holder got the attention he wanted with the words he chose. He could have asked both side to communicate better. Instead he blamed whites and used black history month as a basis for closer understanding. I don’t think it’s a white person rejecting black issue…I think it’s a mutual non understanding. When I was in viet nam i had three black E-6s and one E6 white medic on my team. We had to work together to survive. At the end of the day, if I didn’t like somebody, it was due to their behavior. But we lived together, we fought together and we were there for each other, no matter what. Yes, they were black, and yes I was the white lieutenant….so what.