Little pink houses for you and me
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS are racists. They believe what they believe and they rarely express their beliefs in spoken words, at least not in front of me. When they do speak they make little jokes to make my "liberal" opinions appear ridiculous before they reveal their own. They aren't proud to be racists; in their hearts they know that they are standing on the wrong side of history. But they have a right to their point of view and I can sense in them a smoldering anger that they're not "allowed" to say what they really think. Face it, anyone who proudly declares to be a racist may as well be wearing a swastika or selling bean pies on a traffic island.
But I believe that, deep down, we are all racists, black and white, because we have been drinking water from the same poisoned well our entire lives. We can't help but suffer the symptoms of the disease, but we can get healthier if we understand what's afflicting us. And if we want to get better and not even.
Racism has been in the news a lot this past week, from Louisiana to HBO, from O.J. to Limbaugh. On Thursday thousands of protesters from around the country bussed themselves to Jena, La., briefly tripling the population of a town that no one had heard of before and still can't pronounce. The fact that black America could tell you what "Free the Jena 6" means six months ago illustrates the racial divide in a country that still acts shocked -- shocked! -- that black people feel differently than white people about the deal they've been dealt.
On that same day right-wing windbag Rush Limbaugh reprised his famous "Barack the Magic Negro" song parody in which a white comedian impersonating Al Sharpton sings to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon" about Sen. Barack Obama who "makes guilty whites feel good/ They'll vote for him not for me/'Cause he's not from the hood."
In Jena some stupid white kids hung hangman's nooses from a tree as a "prank" aimed at black students who wanted to sit under the same tree. The white kids got suspended for three days. Weeks later some stupid black kids beat up a white student in retaliation. They got charged with attempted murder, even though the white kid was released from the hospital in two hours. Black people made a fuss. The school administration's solution was to cut down the tree. Ain't that America?
