"What are you doing here?" is a question this country keeps asking black people every day.

[kpete]

Still Not at Home in America
"What are you doing here?" is a question this country keeps asking black people every day.
By: Jack White | Posted: July 17, 2013 at 12:19 AM

(The Root) -- No one is more American than I am. Our country's history is inscribed on my genes.

Some of my ancestors came here on slave ships. One arrived on The Mayflower. Others fought in the Revolution and the great Civil War.

But because I am 67 -- old enough to have personally experienced legally segregated public schools, water fountains and restrooms and white-only public accommodations; old enough to have been shocked into terrified silence by photos of Emmett Till's brutalized body after it was dragged from a muddy river in Mississippi; old enough to have written more stories than I can remember about black men and women who seemed to have lost their lives for no reason other than being black -- I have deeply ambivalent feelings about this nation.

W.E.B. Du Bois called those warring emotions "twoness" and "double consciousness." I call them not feeling at home.


There was a time, in the heady wake of Barack Obama's first successful run for the presidency, when I let myself hope that America would finally let that happen. I thought America might finally stop asking the question it has posed to black people since the days of the slave-hunting "paddy rollers": What are you doing here? I thought it might finally say we belong.

I was so wrong. What are you doing here? is still the question America asks black people like me, all these years after the emancipation, all these years after Brown v. Board, all these years after the passage of civil rights laws, whenever one of us shows up in a place that some white person regards as inappropriate. It's the question that underlies so much of the opposition to Obama's presidency -- not merely his policies, but the man himself -- and the vile comments about his wife and their children.

................

And What are you doing here? was the question with which a gun-toting vigilante named George Zimmerman justified his surveillance of a 17-year-old boy in a hooded sweatshirt whose only crime was arousing Zimmerman's suspicions. Strip away all the nuances of Florida's deeply flawed self-defense laws and the forever-unknowable details about the confrontation that developed that night, and it comes down to this: A self-appointed security man with no more legal authority to stop and question a fellow citizen than the man in the moon felt powerful enough to put that question to Trayvon Martin. Whether Zimmerman knew it or not, he had 350 years of history backing him up,


the rest:
http://www.theroot.com/views/still-not-home-america?wpisrc=root_lightbox

[LuvNewcastle]

1. "Why don't you go back to where you came from?" n/t

[loyalsister]

2. The night and weeks following the 2008 election I was absolutely giddy

It seems to me that part of the result of Obama's election is that it has rooted out some of the ugliest racism that exists. People feel permission to be as ugly as they want to black citizens if the N word applies to the president.
If Obama sees any of it that as I do, I think it would be very painful. On the positive side, we are beginning to have a greater understanding of the danger that comes with implicit racism. That is a step toward combating it.

[Journeyman]

3. "I, Too, Sing America" ~ Langston Hughes . . .

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed --

I, too, am America.

[KG]

4. fuckin' Rec.

[noiretextatique]

5. some american don't believe black people are *really* citizens of the USA

they don't think we should vote or question white privilege in any way. per juror B37: poor george made a mistake...and trayvon was just in the wrong place that says it all.