From a white womans point of view. Barbie McConnell I think the peaceful protests are bringing people together, as you can see here, black and white students. My grandfather was born in 1927, not quite 70 years after the end of the civil war - there were people alive who remembered it when he was a child, child slaves and most definitely children of people who had been born into slavery. The peonage system, which was essentially slavery lasted almost a century after that, complete with murders, rapes, beatings, abuse, intimidation, catastrophic poverty, trumped up crime, virtually no access to education for many many families - the horrific list goes on and on. Its hard, its painful and sickening to really look into it and to fully grasp, to understand - but our ancestors decimated, utterly decimated those families, and you just dont walk away from that without scars, not after just two, three or four generations, it takes time and we have to be sturdy enough to look into it and really try to understand - to look at the big picture, we have not yet made amends, we just havent and the people responsible for the beginning of hell for these people are dead, but the horror of their choices lives on, its not pleasant but there it is. Somebody has to say I am sorry on their behalf. I know people who had a rough child hood and who make the best of it, but their rough and this rough are in two different universes. Think, about, just consider for a moment the powerless black father whose child is sold out of his arms, whose wife is never safe, who will never decide what he does or doesnt do that day, who carries the weight of being born a prisoner on his scarred shoulders -what does that do to a man, and if he survives it how does he raise his son, and how well does that son understand what it is to be a father, to trust, to know its your job to keep your family save, to even believe thats possible? There is work to be done and not just by blacks. They didnt make the mess alone.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 11:39:49 +0000
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