I am so glad we are inching away from the equality rhetoric when we aren't talking about
opportunities.
In the fifties I used to find it a puzzling insult to be considered equal to some prejudiced white
person whose grandma willingly came here on a boat.
I was a kid; but that is how I was raised.
What decent person would want to be 'equal' to a barbarous slaver?
Who wants to be considered equal to a racist who had the choice to come here?
I thought I would understand it better as I got older. When my parents explained African American history to me, I thought, "Aren't we supposed to be the ones who are superior and angry?
Didn't we survive without executing all that violence, force, and assault?
I am more sophisticated now. But I feel quite certain I told my own children: "there are some
things and people to which and to whom we would definitely not want to consider ourselves 'equal'." Yuk ...
Word up. It's a "dirty secret" so many black Americans hold. I wish that self-loathing coward Clarence Thomas understood this. It's something I suppose as you say, you have to be brought up with.
ReplyDeleteThese things may be able to be learned even by those not brought up this way. Let's hope 'better late than
Deletenever' applies because middle class black America needs the jolt these things would signify.