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From:
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Subject: Fw: FYI
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From: Rose Parkman Sent: Tue, November 6, 2012 10:38:56 PM
Subject: FYI
Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of history at Macon State College in
Georgia and wrote this for an editorial in the Macon Telegraph.
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?
NowI 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," 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.
Conservativewhites 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 November 4, 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-pointplan:
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 HAVEovercome."
**************************************
It takes a Village to protect our President!!!
Rose Parkman
"Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that's been
grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes,
the more humane it becomes; the more it can see its own
humanity, the more it
sees the ways in which its humanity has been behaving inhumanly." Sidney
Poitier, The Measure of a Man:A Spiritual Autobiography
