racism
November 2, 2009
- I lost my father on a Sunday in the sixties when I was ten and he was fifty-four. He didn’t die. Despite a lifetime of non-filtered Camels and a high fat diet he was remarkably healthy physically. No, I lost him to a paranoid hate that I cannot decades later understand nor condone. The black and white RCA console television was crackling in a corner of the slightly ...
- Continue Reading » 3 Comments
November 1, 2009
- I've begun to see our perceptual capacities as a kind of funhouse (only not always so much fun). Our paths to clear sight are blocked here by obstacles, there by distorting mirrors. It's easiest to spot the places a fellow-traveler has been tricked into thinking a mirror is a window; and hardest when we find ourselves walking smack into a wall, serenely confident until the last second that we ...
- Continue Reading » 1 Comment
October 29, 2009
- The question I ask myself is why was that innocent woman killed in the court and I don't understand why the authorities didn't react earlier to avoid such a tragedy. Her name is Marwa Al-Sherbany and she is an Egyptian National who was attacked for wearing an Islamic headscarf. The attacker, Alex W. suspected her for being a terrorist. It does not matter what her religion was and I guess she ...
- Continue Reading » 2 Comments
October 27, 2009
- Our house had not caught fire as I’d feared as a girl after watching the Walton’s house burn on TV, and then watching my father place his lit cigarette on the edge of the windowsill so he could kiss me good night. The house had not fallen to disrepair, as others on the street had, like the burnt yellow split level where my best friend had lived, or the one across the street, still the same ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
October 19, 2009
- There is none so dangerous as the white American who waxes nostalgic about what he or she likes to call "the good old days." Or, alternately, those "simpler" times, or the era of so-called "innocence" remembered from their childhoods, memorialized in a Norman Rockwell painting, or via televised re-runs of the Cleaver family, or Opie Taylor casting a line down at the ...
- Continue Reading » 16 Comments
October 5, 2009
- Just to give you a little insight into how my mind works (brace yourself), I just finished reading an article on MSN titled, "10 Things Gas Stations Won't Tell You". It took me a few minutes to force my brain past the idea that gas stations don't talk, but what was really telling was that by the time I got to the first paragraph of the article I had concocted my own list. I don't know ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
September 25, 2009
- Some days it seems so obvious that we might get a lot further ahead if we could admit just how far behind we are.For instance, what if for one day all white people admitted that yes, indeed we are all inherently racist? And what if we went even further to say that it is only the degree to which we disrupt the internalized racism we carry within, that we become less racist--or at least become more ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
September 17, 2009
- By the time Jimmy Carter weighs in, with all due respect to the former President, home builder and Nobel Laureate, you can bet that's pretty much the end of the news cycle for that story. When I watched Mr. Carter offer an opinion about South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson the other day, his face as dour and reproachful as always, it just struck me that this had to be the last nail in the ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
September 17, 2009
- Look Carefully. See anyone you know in this photo? Is it your mother, your aunt, your grandmother? Young Elizabeth Eckford is 'welcomed' by angry white women on her first day of school-southern style. The 'insanity' now, is the 'insanity' of 1957. Rush Limbaugh was only seven and Fox TV did not exist so we can't blame him for stirring our beloved mothers, aunts and grandmothers. As ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
September 16, 2009
- I'm a racist.In reality, I don't believe that to be true and neither would anybody who knows me on a personal basis, but according to Jimmy Carter, an irrelevant former US President widely considered to be one of the worst Presidents ever, I am a racist.And he's just the most recent in a line of people using this tired argument. The race card gets played whenever liberals don't actually have an ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
