That's a question that often preoccupies me these days when I have time to think about politics. I remember, many years ago, being thrilled at the story of Rosa Parks, the brave black woman who decided she wasn't going to be shuffled to the back of the bus anymore. I was too young to hear or understand Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech when it happened, but I heard the recordings, after he'd died at an assassin's hand, and knew I was hearing a voice of moral force nearly without equal in our century.
I'm white. My parents scrupulously taught me to judge people as King exhorted us to -- not by the color of their skins, but by the character of their souls. But I never had any black playmates. I was nearly adult before I lived in an American city, saw black people every day, began to understand in my gut the terrible wrongs that had been done them and the anger that back-lit Rosa Parks's stubbornness and Dr. King's ringing calls for justice.
It's been nearly thirty years now since the Freedom Riders. For me, personally, fifteen years since "the race problem" became real to me in the streets of West Philadelphia. I wish I could have kept my anger and my convictions as pure as they were then. But something ugly and sad happened as I grew older, something that leached the nobility out of black America's cause and squandered most of the moral capital it had won fighting the Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow laws and the lynching rope.
I think Dr. King's heirs forgot their fight was for
I still don't believe what we've come to. The second age of the
racial double standard, a sick parody of the bad old days when a black
man was presumed guilty. Marion Barry abuses the D.C. mayor's office and
snorts crack on video and `movement' blacks march in the streets to
get him acquitted. `Afro-centrists' agitate for their own
(segregated) schools and curricula that would consciously try to write
the white man out of the black child's version of history.
Race-norming. Quotas. `Diversity' enforcers coercing students and
academics throughout America's universities to avoid any action or
speech or even thought that might be `racially offensive', while never
doubting their own entitlement to treat anyone with a white skin as an
unindicted co-conspirator in the Plot to Oppress Blacks -- guilty
until proven innocent. When did the fight for freedom decay into this
obscene scramble for handouts and privileges and discrimination for
And the band plays on, while our black inner cities rot away and one out of every four of young black males graduates from a maelstrom of drugs, violence, and broken families to do time in our jails. Yes, I'm still angry. I hate racism as passionately as I ever did, and I still stand for any black man's right to be judged equally with me. But now I'm as incensed with black politicians as I ever was with white segregationists. It wasn't just a black man's dream they betrayed; it was mine, too. I believed.
I wish I could believe again. Where is the leadership that will tell blacks that they can't end racism by supporting laws that institutionalize it? Where is the man or woman who can give the black underclass a positive vision that goes beyond resentment, dependence on government largesse, and the victim syndrome? Who will wake up the poor blacks in our cities to the fact that they've become their own worst enemies, slaughtering each other in numbers the Klan could only dream of, yearly racking up casualty figures reminiscent of a medium-sized war? Who will speak the hard truth: that, against this hideous backdrop, continued attempts at the moral blackmail of innocent whites with reminders of past racism will only drive them into the arms of hatemongers like David "Sieg-Heil" Duke and his scummy gang of knock-off Nazis?
I am not now nor have I ever been a conservative. But the last thirty
years have made it clear that the conservatives have at least one
thing right;
I spent a good chunk of last Memorial Day weekend playing conga drums
with a multiracial group. I wore a dashiki under my blue eyes and the
black woman playing across from me sported a polo shirt right out of
some preppie catalog and no one there thought either the least bit
odd. Black, white, yellow...didn't matter. Africa's wild thundering
rhythms beat through all of us and the people around clapped and
danced and yelled for joy. I think Dr. King would have approved.
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