Racism Revisited

I figure that I ought to expand my views on racism in America given the obscure references in my previous post.

When I was growing up, my parents taught me to appreciate the unique gifts in each person. Its really that simple. There are differences in people, and the differences that divide people is usually in ideas and principles. Regardless of ideas and principles, God loves each person individually and it is up to each person what they do with that love.

Notice that there is nothing about race in there.

Okay, so when I became an adult, and questions about race would come up, I found it amazing when people would talk about which races were acceptable to be friends with, which races were acceptable to date/marry, etc. Dividing people by race doesn't make any sense to me, especially because we knew many families who had adopted children from all over the world, and the color of someone's skin said almost nothing about their character or personality. I also thought that most people, except those rare racist types, thought like I did.

Jeremiah Wright has made a business out of being black. He has found a way to rally people around him based on the fact that they all share an ancestry from the same continent. That makes no sense to me. Maybe if they shared a same culture, like Tutsi or Kenyan... but no. He really has gathered a whole Church together based on the idea that they claim an allegiance to a large mass of land with as many diverse cultures as a mosaic has colors. And he's found that the easiest way to unite a people is by giving them a common enemy - not because they share a culture. No, they are united in the idea that a common enemy has oppressed them and is a wicked and cruel murderous tyrant. And again, for JW, its a business from which he has profited handsomely.

For him to play the victim is typical, of course. He's used to manipulating people, so why not? Why not bank of hundreds of years of real cruelty and oppression and convince people who are just as privileged as he is that they have suffered from this same cruelty? When one thinks of the real abuse, the inhumanity that occurred during slavery and compare it to what Jeremiah Wright has "suffered", it is a mockery to those who really did suffer. When one thinks of the truly lost opportunities by those who were turned away from jobs, housing and marketplaces and compare it to a Princeton graduate who writes that blacks will never have access to the highest places in American society, it is pure mockery of those truly brave ones like Rosa Park.

Sure, there is still racism in America and in every corner of the world. Human nature has not changed. However, until we stop using racism as an excuse to perpetuate our own victimhood, we will never learn to move beyond it, and we'll never be a nation united.

I say God bless America, and so should every American regardless of race.