(posted on http://nehama.newsvine.com/ Sun Jul 25, 2010)
Let me start by saying that i'm black, OK? or rather half black, half Jewish (one up on diversity over our President), and this story with Shirley Sherrod is annoying me. Why do i have to disclose my ethnicity? because this is a racist country, and different ethnicities are allowed different narratives and disallowed others. So for me to talk about Shirley Sharrod's racism without being thrown off the website, i probably need to disclose this piece of personal information.
So - i don't get it. My father grew up in Mississippi in the 30's and 40's. He served in WWII in a segregated Navy. He knew of racism first hand, but what i learned from him is that people should be treated equally, not as white or black or green. Not because white people aren't racist, or because the Civil Right's Act, or having a black President, mean that somehow white racism has disappeared. It has not. But because being hated, feared, or just treated as dumb, doesn't justify being a reverse racist.
So he, and therefore his children, did not need some major revelation that being white and poor sucks just as much as being black and poor. Even if some poor white people illogically and ignorantly blame their predicament on blacks (or labor immigrants).
Maybe it was his Marxist self education, maybe it was his strict Baptist upbringing ("do unto others...."), but he understood and instilled in me the understanding that changing society means you do not emulate the behaviors you want to eradicate, even in the privacy of "your own kind".
All this is not to justify the race bashing leveraged against the NAACP by the trigger happy media, the administration, nor the NAACP who willingly to throw a black women under the bus without giving her the benefit and minimal respect of doubt.
But as another black women to another, kudos for your realization Ms Sherrod, but let's not pretend that calling whites "there own kind" is acceptable because of slavery, Jim Crow, or the more subtle forms of racism of today.
So - i don't get it. My father grew up in Mississippi in the 30's and 40's. He served in WWII in a segregated Navy. He knew of racism first hand, but what i learned from him is that people should be treated equally, not as white or black or green. Not because white people aren't racist, or because the Civil Right's Act, or having a black President, mean that somehow white racism has disappeared. It has not. But because being hated, feared, or just treated as dumb, doesn't justify being a reverse racist.
So he, and therefore his children, did not need some major revelation that being white and poor sucks just as much as being black and poor. Even if some poor white people illogically and ignorantly blame their predicament on blacks (or labor immigrants).
Maybe it was his Marxist self education, maybe it was his strict Baptist upbringing ("do unto others...."), but he understood and instilled in me the understanding that changing society means you do not emulate the behaviors you want to eradicate, even in the privacy of "your own kind".
All this is not to justify the race bashing leveraged against the NAACP by the trigger happy media, the administration, nor the NAACP who willingly to throw a black women under the bus without giving her the benefit and minimal respect of doubt.
But as another black women to another, kudos for your realization Ms Sherrod, but let's not pretend that calling whites "there own kind" is acceptable because of slavery, Jim Crow, or the more subtle forms of racism of today.
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