Obama has a lot to learn about racism

[jaysunb]

This caputures my feelings exactly...

President Obama and I share some similarities. We both were born into interracial families; we both were raised in single-parent households; and we both acknowledge that most of our successes are owed to our white grandmothers who nurtured, loved, inspired, taught and instilled in us the courage to fail.

However, the year President Obama was born, I was being spit upon and had food and drink poured on my head at lunch counters in North Carolina. When he was celebrating his first birthday, I was attending the funeral of my college roommate, Bill Foster, who died in an ambulance from injuries suffered in football practice because the white hospital in Charlotte refused to treat him. By the president’s second birthday the doctors were removing a ricocheted bullet from my thigh that was fired at us during a civil-rights march. In 2000, when the president was serving as an Illinois state senator, an administrator at Nicholls State University was telling me that I should not expect young white athletes to follow the directions of an elderly black coach. And the year that President Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, a 12-year-old black girl was strip searched in front of her class in a Lafourche Parish middle school by three white teachers.

President Obama’s generation, and subsequent generations of black people, think that racial disrespect and hatred is ancient history and when encountered often dismiss it as isolated ignorance. Because they did not go through the struggles, and because we as black parents, teachers, ministers, commentators and others have failed to instill the history, meaning, importance, appreciation and price of the struggle for our civil rights, his and younger generations do not realize or recognize the depth, virulence and threatening nature of racial hatred in this country.

more : http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20090923/LETTERS/909239986/1031

[Fire1]

1. Charles Mosley is assuming an awful lot that black teachers,

parents and ministers are not educating black youth on the history, meaning, appreciation and price of the struggle for our civil rights. The mind set you describe is perpetuated by black people who are uneducated and have had limited exposure to anything or anybody outside of a 12 mile radious of their neighborhood. They don't read and are only interested in local news that effects them and their community. As educators, this is the mind set we fight to despell each and every day and trust me, it's an uphill battle that never ends.

One thing is for sure, however. At some point in time, as they venture into the world beyond the borders of their neighborhood, they ALL find out what Ms. Fire1 and many many others have been trying to instill in them during their years in school. Whether it's at a job or in college, sooner or later, they all experience racism, even Barack Obama.

[BlooInBloo]

2. If a white kid of the 80s from Seattle can recognize it immediately, I doubt Obama is confused.