This is about the white community:

In 1985, my father and mother moved to Tennessee from Loma Linda, CA, where they had lived for the past 50 years. Now they built a house near the Tennessee River. Less than 10 miles from their new house, the people of that county had named a bridge in loving memory for General Forrest. Their neighbors were very friendly and offered my parents everything they needed, from tractors to trucks, and told my parents to keep them until they no longer had need of them. Then, one day after the house was built, my father, who was a pastor, heard about a black man who needed a place to stay. My father offered his basement for free. It consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, a large living room and two bathrooms.

Everything went fine until the neighbors, none of whom lived closer than half a mile away, heard that a black man was living in my parents basement. Some of these neighbors had lived on the same property and even in the same house their ancestors owned and lived in since before the Civil War. When they saw my parents letting that black man live at their house, those neighbors wouldn't have anything more do with my parents. They no longer phoned and they came and picked up all the nice things they had loaned. They didn't ask if my folks were done with them.

What a story John 3:17 and how maddening! How people can act like that is beyond me!!! I JUST DON"T understand how ANYONE can treat another human badly based not on their actions, or their crimes, or anything "bad" but just their skin color! How in the WORLD has skin color been equated with "bad"? It is just as rediculous as saying that people with blue eyes are smarter than people with brown eyes. Absolutely rediculous! I applaud your Dad for doing what was right regardless of what the neighbors thought. You had a good dad! Too bad everyone in the world isn't like your Dad.

Excuse me as I now step off my soap box.

Thank you, Taylor.

I'm not saying that Loma Linda is perfect or anything but it just illustrates that the "white community" is not all the same in all places, because I am sure that in Loma Linda, as well as elsewhere, you could find lots of people willing to do what my dad did. Nor would I want anyone to think that all southern whites are racist. There are a lot of unbiased, loving people there, too. It's just that racial prejudice is so deeply ingrained and an accepted way of life. When I traveled through the South once, I couldn't get a room at a certain motel in New Orleans because the man who came to the door said it was for blacks only. The laws made discrimination illegal but what the laws can't change are people's hearts.

Hi Lazarus,

I had an army buddy who was half black and half white. I will never forget how he cried one day and said that he would never wish his worst enemy would have to go through what he had been through in his life. He said he didn't feel accepted by blacks and he didn't feel accepted by whites, either.

I think maybe it is time that we accept anyone like that as white if they want to be accepted that way. When someone is half white and half black, why do we always assume they are "black" and not white? I am not saying Obama is white-- I don't know. But supposing he says he thinks of himself as white and wants others to refer to him as white, is that so ridiculous? I am sure most people think so, but maybe we should begin to change our ideas about that. I admit it isn't easy but I think it's something we have to be willing to strive to do if we want to see a color blind world and if we want to stop the pain that comes from focusing on the color of people's skin.

Having lived in Northern states and being young, idealist, I was a strong supporter and worked for equal rights I had a shock when I moved to and worked in the southern states. Even today being a white women traveling alone in the deep south is often difficult.

After a while it is easy to become defensive. In my opinion that is one of the reasons that laws can't eliminate discrimination on either side.

I could, but won't, give you some personal experiences of being humiliated, scared etc.

Who said anything about not being american, of not being proud to be an american? How old are you anyway? I'm thinking you can't be no more than 15. Ain't no way a grown man or woman with good sense could post some of the sophomoric drivel that rolls off your keyboard.

I am secure with being a part of this country. I was born here. So were my great great ancestors. Just because I don't fart 'yankee doodle dandy' every time I eat a bowl of beans doesn't mean I somehow dislike or disown my country.

Besides, being african american is a unique state of being. It is not necessarily african, nor is is uniquely american. At the same time it is as american as apple pie. Who knows? the 1st person to bake an american apple pie was probably a black nanny. I'm willing to venture you could take a poll of 1,000 black americans, from every section and class, and ask them what it means to be an american, and each one would give you a different answer. The answers would probably run the range from sprinters John Carlos and Tommy Smith lowering their heads and giving the black gloved, black power salute on the victory podium in '68, to George Foreman waving the flag and giving a victory thankyou nod during the same olympics. And each response would be correct in its own way. Db

I've been reading the posts on this thread. Man, get off that hobby horse! Or, to mix metaphors, y'all are beating that pore old hoss to death! Get a life. There is a great work to do for God. Better to focus on that than to play the race card.

Dave

No one, certainly not I. You simply misunderstood what I wrote. Perhaps you might want to go back and reread it to be sure you understood it. I assure you I never implied that blacks are necessarily any less proud to be American than whites are.



Only since you asked, friend:

I am in my 50s and have degrees from two different public colleges and one from Loma Linda University. I have also taken classes in the History of the Negro in America taught by a black American professor and have been working for the past 20 years near Los Angeles with black gang youth and mostly with black staff members. I remember and took a deep interest in the Civil Rights Movement when I was just a youth, and I used to admire many black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X, whose many taped talks I listened to over and over again and which we discussed at great length in class. I even met and talked personally with Eldridge Cleaver at the University of Redlands when he spoke there in 1984. So, while I am by no means an opponent of black people, neither do I like a person just because he is black. All races have more than their share of bad people. I believe in Martin Luther King's maxim that people ought to be judged by the content of their character.

It's likely that you feel the way you do because you are misunderstanding what I am saying. Ever since I was a kid I have been writing, my earliest job during high school being as a rewriter of human interest stories for the Loma Linda Bulletin, some years after which I studied English Composition at California State University and Humboldt State U. I taught a writing class at Cal State U as part of the Master's requirement. Recently I've enjoyed teaching adults to read and write at the local library in the adult literacy progam. So, you see, what I am saying is that I can't understand what it is about my writing that you have found to be such "drivel."

Nevertheless I invite you to help me see it with my own eyes. I'd like to delete it if you can show me any and I am absolutely positive you can do it. I hate that sort of thing as much as you apparently do yourself.



I just love your last section. You've really expressed some worthwhile thoughts.

Now please go back to the first section and reread what I wrote and then calmly analyze it, telling me what it is exactly that you felt meant that you have no pride in being American. It's always possible I wrote something in my half-sleep so that I scarcely knew what I was saying because I often write soon after coming home from having worked all night. My sincere apologies to you, friend, if I wrote anything that hurt your feelings. Please believe me when I say that my only intention has always been to write the truth as I see it.

God bless and have a wonderful Sabbath!!

I'm sincerely sorry to hear of your disillusionment. I hope those things won't cause you to lose your ideals, because, in spite of some bad people, your ideals are worth keeping alive and working toward.

It sounds like you got many of your ideas about certain things in the South from the mass media, but of course when it comes to that sort of thing, they don't tell all of the truth or even half of it. For to tell all of the truth would be too disturbing. Most people don't like the real truth; they just like thinking they do when they can believe a lie that makes them feel good and persuade themselves that it's the truth.

That is what I meant a while back when I said that there's a great gulf fixed between what I experience and what political correctness requires people to believe about race and race relations in this country. Back before the Civil Rights Movement, political correctness required people to believe some lies, and it is the same today, only they're a different set of lies.

If a person chooses to tell the truth about what he has experienced and if those experiences don't agree with the politically correct view, he better be prepared for people to try and intimidate him in various ways into keeping quiet or into saying what they want to hear. However, attempts at intimidation are an almost daily occurrence at my job and even in my work as a photographer on the streets of Los Angeles, so I am used to it. Besides, I used to run with guys who intimidated others and so I got to see it from the point of view of the intimidators. Some of these intimidators have learned that the ones they want to manipulate would rather do almost anything than get screamed at and called names in public, so that's the very thing they do until the individual who's intimidated does what they want.



You have a good point about why the laws can't eliminate discrimination. Discrimination from either side comes out of the heart, and people's hearts are often hardened by the bad experiences they suffer at the hands of those of the other race. We all need to determine that we will be one of those who ends the cycle of hatred, that we will always treat others as we want to treated, no matter what others may do to us.

I'm sorry about any humiliation and fear you may have experienced. I know about those things too. So I can imagine yours. This is as good a place as there is anywhere to talk about it. People really need to know so they can understand what it is like. Otherwise they might, like you did for a time, go on believing an untruth.

I was just reading about Eldredge Cleaver. How he became a republican and an evangelical christian. If he wanted to be a republican, that's okay. I guess he wasn't that big of a fraud. I never heard him lecture. I did hear stokely carmichael. the stuff he was saying was passe, but he still was talking that revolutionary gibberish.
I've read the autobiography of malcolm x 3 or 4 times. After reading the liner notes about how the ghost writer, Alex Haley, had a career in the us coast guard, I too joined the coast guard. I have also read a lot about martin luther king, jr, heard all the sermons, read some of the biographies.