Race In America

This one has been on my mind all day, so I figured I better get it out of my system


I remember when I was about 10 yrs old and my Dad's mom died.  She lived in Hammond and we went there on weekends for my dad to fix up the house to sell.  Me and my brother would play outside but we weren't aloud to leave the yard.  There was a little black girl that lived next door and we were talking through the fence when my dad came out and told me I wasn't aloud to play with her.  That was the first time I remember anyone drawing attention to the color of someone's skin to me.  


Funny thing about kids is, they just don't care about such things until someone decides they have to teach them differently.  Just because they are kids, doesn't make them wrong. To this day I still cannot understand why people have to make such a big deal about the color of someone's skin.  No one gets to choose it, it is simply given to you.  You don't get to choose the country you are born into, you don't get to choose the family you are born into, and you don't get to chose the color of your hair, eyes or skin.  So why do people discriminate based on such things?  I would say it was really juvenile, but kids don't care. 


I learned about a lot of black people in our country's history, when they still actually taught you the truth of your country's history.  People who risked their lives just to be treated like everyone else.  A lot of people lost their lives unnecessarily so that black people could be treated the same as everyone else.  Its not something they should have had to fight for, it should have been common sense to anybody who read the Bible.  But it wasn't.  It still isn't.


I thought our country had made great strides in the years following the Civil Rights movement. but I was terribly disillusioned.  In 2008, I was bored, out of a job and chose to work as a volunteer for a Presidential campaign.  For once I was going to stand up for something I believed in.  What I learned was racism is alive and well in America, people are just a little more conscious of hiding it, or at least they were then.  Never in a hundred years would I have ever thought that a black union worker would walk up to a house in my hometown, and have a gun put in his face for knocking on someone's door.  These were some of the nicest, non-threatening guys I had ever met and I was embarrassed by the way they were treated.  Cussed out and threatened because someone didn't like the color of their skin.


Seems the longer we have a black President the more people decide it is no longer necessary to hide the way they feel about that.  The office he holds is supposed to afford him a certain amount of respect from Congressmen, Senators and the people of this country.  Yes, we will always point out their faults and we will always argue the politics of the decisions that are made. What gets done and what doesn't, and how it affects the country. Yes, some people will use unflattering names.  But for some silly reason, I expected better from people in public office.  Oh, they don't come out and say it, because that would just be stupid, but its not real hard to read between the lines of some of them.


I am not perfect, nor do I expect anyone else to be.  I do however expect my fellow Americans to treat ALL Americans the same, not just the ones who have skin color they can live with.  No one gets to claim to be better than anyone else by virtue of the color of their skin.


What I know now, is that we can't be proud that we elected a black man as President.  Even if Hillary had been elected, would could have been proud we elected a woman.  I don't think Hillary would have been treated this way, and if she were, I would be saying something about that as well.  We could have been proud that we had caught up with the rest of the world where these issues are concerned.  But alas, we have allowed those people who are so impressed with the color of their skin to throw us right back into the 60's.  Thanks America for making me proud.