Without Love There Is No Life, Without Life There Is No Love"
Please,
please pass this one on, even if you have to print it and mail it to your
"computer challenged" friends and relatives. Don't forget
your Caucasian friends and "relatives".
Read
what a white reporter wrote in a Georgia newspaper
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Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of
history at Macon State College in Georgia and wrote this for an editorial in
the Macon Telegraph.
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Andrew M. Manis: When Are WE Going to Get
Over It?
For much of the last forty years, ever since America
"fixed" its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts,
we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to
blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, "When
are African Americans finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask:
"When are we White Americans going to get over our
ridiculous obsession with skin color?
Recent reports that "Election Spurs Hundreds' of
Race Threats, Crimes" should frighten and infuriate every one of us.
Having grown up in "Bombingham [Birmingham]," Alabama in the 1960s, I
remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates
and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther
King.
Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases,
someone decided to do more than "talk the talk."
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal
shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my
boyhood.
We white people have controlled political life in the
disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent.
Conservative whites have been in
power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years,
conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the
right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone
was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either
of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes.
Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no
bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan,
the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody
Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and
we're back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be
proud that we've proven what conservatives are always saying -- that in America
anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president.
But instead we now hear that school children from Maine
to California are talking about wanting to "assassinate Obama."
Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, "How
long?"
How long before we white people realize we can't make our
nation, much less the whole world, look like us?
How long until we white people can - once and for all -
get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color?
How long until we white people get over the demonic
conviction that white skin makes us superior?
How long before we white people get over our bitter
resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
How long before we get over our expectations that we
should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin?
How long until we white people end our silence and call
out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our
white-only conversations?
I believe in free speech, but how long until we white
people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag
burners?
How long until we white people will stop insisting that
blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate
themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to
become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them
when they do?
How long before we start "living out the true
meaning" of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women
are created equal and that "red and yellow, black
and white" all are precious in God's sight?
Until this past November4, I didn't believe
this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still
don't believe I'll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism
problem.
But here's my three-point plan:
First, everyday that Barack Obama lives
in the White House that Black Slaves Built, I'm going to pray
that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family
from us white people.
Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I
overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature
about President Obama.
Third, I'm going to pray to live long enough to
see America surprise the world once again, when white people can "in spirit and
in truth" sing of our damnable color prejudice,
"We HAVE overcome."
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It takes a Village to protect our President!!!
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