I love to race. I’ve raced remote controlled cars and full sized cars. I’ve raced in the water and on foot. I love to watch others race too, from NASCAR to the Olympics. But that does not make me a racist!
I grew up in a mid-sized, mid-western town. I attended a small, country school with all 13 grades on one campus. There were twenty-something kids in my senior class, which means there were around 300-350 students in the entire school. Out of those, there were right about three black kids.
A few members of my family were (and are) blatant bigots. I heard more “nigger jokes” than I care to admit. If my life had been this way all along, I might also be a bigot. But God had other plans.
When I was in second grade (at the tender age of eight), my dad got a job with the Reagan administration and we spent two years living in Northern Virginia. I was bussed to school. No, I don’t mean that I lived so far from a suitable campus that I had to ride a bus to get there. I mean fell victim to the ridiculous 1960’s civil rights scam in which a small number of white kids are hauled across town to attend a black school and vice versa. This was some how supposed to even out the segregated school system. What a stupid idea. However, it did have an effect on civil rights, at least as far as one white eight year old from Texas was concerned. It revealed to me the truth behind racism. And here it is:
Racism is not about the struggle of the black man under the boot of the white man. Racism is not about minorities clamoring for undeserved “entitlements”. Racism is about hate, pure and simple.
Here was an innocent little boy from Texas (well, mostly innocent) who had probably not seen more than a dozen blacks in his whole life. Suddenly, I found myself in a large, inner-city elementary school with two, count ’em, two other white kids. There was one white teacher, who, in hind sight, I’m pretty sure was gay. The rest were bitter, angry, frustrated, black women. In my first week of class, my English teacher said I was stupid and that “those schools down in Texas must not teach nuthin’.” My third grade teacher refused to accept a paper that was wrinkled because she said I had tried to throw it away. (That logic still eludes me.) When I protested, I was given an after school detention. This was the worst punishment available, as it meant my father would have to drive an hour through Washington D.C. traffic to pick me up. I remember my mom sitting me down and asking me if I knew what “honky” meant, just in case.
I’m not trying to garner sympathy here. I’m simply trying to explain that I have learned what it is to be discriminated against for no other reason than the color of my skin. When those teachers saw me, they didn’t see a boy, they saw a white boy and thus their own little chance to avenge their own sufferings. How could that be any different than the racism they may well have faced growing up?
God taught me a valuable lesson. All people really are equal in this one thing. They are all fallen creatures capable of hate. But they all have the opportunity to rise above that. Through the grace of God we can choose to look beyond the surface because the surface is nothing.
This logic goes both ways, mind you. Every white man and woman can (and should) ignore the ignorant indoctrination they’ve heard about “those” black people and refuse to assume the worst when they meet one. If you don’t clutch your purse or lock your car door when you see a white guy, why would you when you see a black guy? (Trust me, there are plenty of white guy’s out there for whom you should lock your doors.)
By the same token, black men and women can (and should) ignore the ignorant indoctrination they’ve heard about white people. The government is not out to get you and if a white person gets a job for which you applied, don’t assume it’s because “da Man” is keeping you down.
Now that I have that off my chest, here are the articles I was going to blog about when I started this sermon. (Sorry. I got carried away.)
I really like Morgan Freeman. I’m certain there are issues on which we would not see eye to eye, but every time I see him speak publicly, I like him even more. He is very intelligent and articulate (proving that Ebonics is a scam). I recently read part of an interview he did in which Mike Wallace (the crown prince of liberal media pukage) asked him about racism. Why, oh why, must the media insist on saddling every successful black man or woman with this same question? Well, Morgan had a brilliant answer:
“How can we get rid of racism?
“Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man,” Freeman says to Wallace. “And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You wouldn’t say, ‘Well, I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.’ You know what I’m sayin’?”
You may have read about Mayor Ray Nagin’s “chocolate city” comment. (If not, you can learn about it here and here.) Today I read the most intelligent comment on the matter I’ve heard so far.
If we’re talking about making a conscious effort to repopulate New Orleans with a high percentage of African-Americans, let’s be clear about why anyone would even really worry about this in the first place: Louisiana Democrats running in statewide campaigns cannot win, cannot even come close, without a concentrated base of political support in New Orleans.
In other words, the black Democratic political leaders in Louisiana (like the disgraced Mr. Nagin) need their “huddled masses” of poor blacks back. They’ve spent the last three decades or so conditioning those people to believe that their only hope is the Democratic party and it’s government hand-outs when, in fact, Republicans, white or black, would do what those same huddled masses really need: Stop giving them hand-outs and help them help themselves out of the disgusting poverty of the 9th ward. These are people, after all, not just votes.
In another follow-up (I promise no more follow-ups this week!), I posted about 
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