A Kid With Skittles | James Howard Kunstler

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Apr. 16, 2012 -- In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (Apr. 13; "An Activist for Our Times&quot and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just not very honestly.

The Trayvon Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all over the cable TV networks and the Internet. It's been an inconclusive discussion because the facts of the case are so muddled and the truth may never be known, or may not satisfy anyone if it becomes known. Mostly, the talk followed predictable patterns of grievance, accusation, and especially hand-wringing -- the latter well represented by Bill Moyers, the embodiment of 1960s-vintage idealist Democratic liberalism, who came on the scene as a close aide to President Lyndon Johnson at the height of the civil rights struggle.

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World News Trust: http://tinyurl.com/7sdwe8k

[JDPriestly]

1. What a dumb article, especially this:

Well it's hard not to sympathize with that, but it still leaves us with the burden of all the tragic choices we made since those heady days of 1964 and 1965 when Bill Moyers could stand behind President Johnson signing those landmark civil rights bills, basking in the broad-based belief that real human progress was being made.

http://tinyurl.com/7sdwe8k

I was there. I remember that time. After hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination, after battling in some cases to the death just to have a few crumbs from the then already crumbling but very tasty American cake, African-American frosting remained quite aware that it was still obviously chocolate and not vanilla. Why not? What in the world is to criticize about that?

The author of the article suggests that African-Americans should have readily abandoned the lessons of solidarity and wariness that they learned over the hundreds of years during which they were oppressed and punished just for the color of their skin.

And that is what is wrong with the view of too many of us white folks about "integration" and "affirmative action" and the Civil Rights movement. We think of them as the gifts of our (superior) race to "those other people." No guys, being treated equally and fairly, those are Creator-given, not white-folks-given human rights that we, the white majority, withheld, especially in the South, from people merely based on the color of their skin.

Slavery, segregation, humiliation based on the color of the skin -- those were strictly, purely and solely traditions, customs or institutions created in the minds and hearts of white people. White people alone are responsible for the legacy of slavery to the extent it still dominates in some of white society, to the extent the price is still paid by people of color -- of all sorts of colors. We cracked the whip. We locked the chains. We bought and sold our fellow humans (ultimately, way back in Africa, not necessarily from white merchants, but that is a different story that has nothing to do with our responsibility for perpetrating the crimes against nature that slavery and segregation were.)

This burden, the white man's burden, cannot be shifted from the powerful, from the perpetrators, to the weak, to the victims. Not in Sunday op-eds, not in our streets and not in our prisons.

It's our burden, the white man's burden, not the black man's burden. It's up to us white guys to change the reality. The op-ed missed the point -- entirely -- in my view.