One can rest assured that anytime people of color, especially black people, point the finger at a racist, the bigots will hide behind the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. cleric’s robe, then peek out. Without fail, they then use the quote about the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin. Living black in America, I have experienced its fears and privileges for over sixty years. When Dr. King recited the most famous iteration of his, I Have a Dream Speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was a child. Republicans like Mitch McConnell would like us to believe that the election of Barack Obama changed the American reality. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president,”he said. “I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that, and I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it,” he finished. Mr. McConnell missed that his recitation of history did not change the narrative but exposed it.
I Have a Dream… or…
I have tried hard to discern the fears of white America that would incentivized them to attempt an overthrow of democracy and drive hundreds of miles to kill. A parent assisted Kyle Rittenhouse in at least one case. Could it be that an emboldened corner of White America does not mind black people having a dream as long as it does not become a reality? Or does the truth lay in a quote from Dr. King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965--
“[H]e gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”
Is the fear of life in the minority so frightening that the death of others or their own a reasonable alternative? No group has come to these shores—either by force or choice, with the intention of domination, except for white men. The new Americans created a doctrine justifying genocide and enslavement; Manifest Destiny. This dogma was dedicated to the idea that God bestowed the white man with the right to expand and own the nation. When white men could not control the inhabitants, they killed them; when they needed labor, they stole it. It is not fear of retaliation, jobs, or status but the loss of dominating power that drives White Supremacy. Lynching, race riots, and terrorism always accompany the forward movement of blacks in America. It is not surprising there is a push to hide America’s racial history so we can be doomed to repeat it in ignorance.
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