'Can My Children Be Friends With White People?’
Excerpt: Donald Trump’s election has made it clear that I will teach my boys the lesson generations old, one that I for the most part nearly escaped. I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people. As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal. (The NYTimes just published an article titled 'Can My Children Be Friends With White People?’ And the answer is, no, not really. Below are two paragraphs from the article, that I find absolutely the saddest things to read in a very long time. This parent has decided that Trump's election and the "tolerance" she believes all Whites have for his assorted dumb and insensitive statements about people are proof that Whites are in fact mostly just too different, too blind, too consciously or unconsciously racist to ever be trusted by Black Americans. And of course if you cannot really trust someone at all, you cannot delude yourself into thinking you can be friends. One of the phrases really got my attention, the references to the "rending, violent, often fatal betrayal". So White friends are murdering Blacks "often"? I'm still stuck on the sad fact that the huge majority of Blacks murdered are murdered by other Blacks. And that a detailed study by a Black professor last year concluded that there was no actual pattern of racist killings of Black men by cops. (That doesn't mean there was not a single case of an unwarranted shooting, it just means there's no statistically observable pattern.) One facet out of many of our present unfortunate situation of racial tensions is the perception by so many that there is in fact a huge incidence of violence and murder against Blacks in this country by Whites. That's simply not supportable by any evidence, and in fact there's statistically more violence by Blacks against Whites than the reverse. But perception becomes all too real for people. I wish I had an answer for this, other than Mr. Trump getting lockjaw. Which would not solve the problem, but at least there would be less gas thrown on this smoldering fire. I can only pray somehow these tensions get relieved. And there will be no barriers, real or perceived, between any Americans being friends. --Del)
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