When our current President was running for his first term, I was very skeptical. I was skeptical about President Obama winning and I believed that his winning would result in a racist backlash. I didn't have the opinion that a lot of men and women did, that the country would change. I thought that there was a lot of forward thinking people, however, I didn't believe that people who had a backwards mindset would just go away or eventually die off. Recent events have opened up a lot of old wounds that were already infected and brought them back up to the surface. When Michael Brown was shot, I was talking to a relative, and I stated that I questioned the credibility and the attitudes of the Ferguson Police Department. I wondered how the leadership could not be cognizant of the issues between African Americans and the Police department when there were only 3 police officers. The relative thought that I was saying that I could not believe that this sort of thing would happen in the US and that I was surprised that African Americans men were treated brutally by law enforcement in the US. When I asked why they thought that, I was told well you were always friendly with them growing up, and I thought that you were too idealistic, and were more sympathetic to the White cause. Now this statement did surprise me. My relative next told me,”...you always thought that I was racist, too, and I am not. You know those people are huggers, and when some of them have approached me, I have hugged them. “ I made a smart remark, which I shouldn't have. The smart remark caused more of an argument than if I had said the truth. The truth was that I was disappointed. My relative was from a past generation and had experience life before and after the Civil Rights Movement. And they had witnessed various changes, yet in the end, it was still us and them. I had nothing to say, because right now I am in a questionable situation financially. I lost my job last year, and I pretty much lost everything. Although I am working, I am pretty much starting over and one thing that I have relearned about being poor. If you are in need and the person helping you isn't, they don’t mind showing you their ugly side. And, who are you to say anything, you don’t have anything, you are in no position to be on the morally “right” side. You are in no position to say, ”hey, do you hear yourself talking?”
I grew up in a mostly African American community. It was transitioning, also known as "White Flight," African Americans were moving in and other nationalities were moving out. However, when I was young, it was awesome, because there were all types of people and if you were a cute little, almost everyone was friendly. Our neighborhood was African American/Chinese /Jewish/Hungarian and Italian. Ok, we only had one Hungarian doctor, but he always had a big bowl of M&Ms on his coffee table. So, he counts, a lot. And, my grade school and high school were integrated. So, I was friendly with whoever was friendly with me, and because I was around other cultures at home, I was not hesitant about being around other cultures at school. I just looked at the situation as a greater potential for friends. My mom used to say that things would be different when I grew up. That I would live and work in the Black community and that my White friends would live and work in their communities, and that these attitudes that we have now as kids would change, so it would be better for me if I got used to it now. I listened, but I also thought that my generation was going to be different. It was going to be better; it was not going to accept behaviors and attitudes that were wrong. But, today, I was reading a Facebook post about a church that was losing in Detroit, and they are probably going to destroy the building. At least that was what my classmate hoped, because the community is mostly Islamic, and she would hate it if “they” used that building and converted it into a Mosque. She would rather have the building destroyed. This is not the first evidence of racism from others in my class or even from this person, but it made me sad. My heart sank. What was the famous quote, which Martin Luther King Jr. said? "..it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning." It is still true, maybe not in many churches or Mosques, but the infection is there in the old wounds of newer generations. And, it will probably be passed on to their children.
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