Race Relations

I was thinking about the path people take in life.

In particular, I was thinking about a black cultural phenomenon of black people getting down on other blacks that try to do well in school, are interested in learning, and want to improve themselves and their chances in life. They are harassed and the popular black culture is to work to prevent anyone from bettering themselves through education.

How ironic.

When the Civil War ended and the Klu Klux Klan arose in the South in response to the blacks being given the vote, the goal was to keep the blacks ignorant and fearful. Many early Klansmen would pull pranks on the terrified freed slaves, pretending to be ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers. That's where the uniform came from, it's a glorified version of the ghost cape children wear on Halloween. I remember one story I heard, the Klansman had rigged a bladder device under his robe and when he made his appearance, he poured a whole bucket of water into it, in a way that looked like he drank down the whole bucket as fast as he could pour it in. Then he exclaimed, "Damn, it's hot in hell! Sure makes me thirsty!" Before the Civil War, it was a crime to teach a black person to read. Those unrepentant Confederates would sure be proud of the black youth of today, continuing their efforts to keep blacks ignorant and therefore at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Education is free. It's not a trick. Education does not mean that blacks will be automatically accepted or that they will not still run into prejudice and resistance by bigots. It does mean that if someone works hard in school, earns degrees or a degree, and then persists in looking around in the workplace, they will eventually find something better than they could ever hope for than if they remained willfully ignorant. It would be nice if those that do not buy into this idea would at least get the hell out of the way of those that do.

I'm not black, so I have no idea what it's like. It's easy for me to sit in my comfortable existence and make lofty pronouncements about how things should be. I tried tutoring inner city middle school students for a while, and I left feeling it was hopeless.

I assume that most blacks see my white face and assume that I like things the way they are, with blacks still the "bottom rail" as they used to say back in Lincoln's time. I don't. I don't like it when someone is bright and hard working and can't get a break, just as much as I don't like it when someone white and privileged and utterly ignorant gets to be President of the United States. But you can't tell that from looking at my face. Our black/white dialog is so constricted, restricted, and bitter today. What this means is if I have something encouraging to say, I am just as unlikely to say it as if I had something degrading or racist to say. I think that what happens because we self-segregate according to race and because we can't talk about these things, is that we do become a little more racist as we grow older. We can't understand or tolerate the various conflicts that periodically erupt over the world over long past events (Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda), yet we're guilty of it ourselves here in this country.

How the hell do we evolve past this point?