I love to listen to Randi Rhodes on most days. Today was not one of those days.
The issue under review was the appropriate subject matter, and approach, a pastor in a southside Chicago Christian church should entertain on Christmas.
With all due respect to Randi, she has no legitimate dog in this fight. She demonstrated the pernicious effects of white racism this afternoon, adding fuel to a volcanic rage that may well explode in the near future. Many of us Caucasians show our racism in these matters, but at no time did Randi offer up her bonafides in the area of what it is like growing up in a majority-black neighborhood during the 1960's.
Had she lived in a majority black neighborhood as I did, she would have come to understand that the only people doing anything substantive about the 1960's assassinations were the black activists. Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali – to name a few – were on the front lines lending their considerable reputations and names, and in some cases their blood, to the cause of Civil Rights, to the cause of holding the white establishment accountable for offenses almost too numerous to reconcile.
I ducked many a major ass-whippin' at the hands of angry black teenagers who were looking for anything Caucasian onto which they could vent their frustration and rage. And there were considerable quantities of both. Many of my white friends became ferocious racists as a result of the repeated acts of violence directed at them, the local infrastructure or anything that reminded black youths of, "whitey."
The daughter of my "Aunt Winney," a white woman who lived across the street from me and was married to a black master sergeant, crawled home a good half mile on her hands and knees after a gang of black girls had stabbed her in the chest. She was, perhaps, thirteen years old. Her younger brother, obviously suffering some form of PTSD as a result of this incident, proved his manhood by jamming his hand under a large glass truck moving up the street.
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