My brother, Fogged Occurance, reminded us today of the “I have a dream” speech by Dr. King. Of course there was a march and rememberance on the mall in Washington. Another group gathered “by coincidence” with another agenda. I am not particularly known for being liberal, but even I have a hard time believing that ANYTHING done by any of the political views can be coincidental. I just ain’t buying it.
Strangely enough, the subject of bigotry came up in conversation with my mother just yesterday. I commented on the amount of ‘trash’ e-mails I have received from friends and family that just make your skin crawl. I am most offended by relatives who are supposed to know me but still think I would approve of bigoted and ugly jokes, stories and/or cartoons. I have never passed them on to others, I have never given them more than a cursory glance before deleting them. I also have never replied to any of them saying ‘how dare you’. I guess that is part of the reason for my breaking blog silence. The ‘N’ word has never been part of my vocabulary. Mother taught us early on that it would not be tolerated in our house. I grew up with that and separated myself from those did use it. To me it was a guilt by association thing. When my kids were small I had an employee that was black who came to the house often enough that they thought he was their cousin.
It still bothers me that the first thing we use to describe people is their color. We don’t say anything if they are white but we always seem to say “ you know, tall, black guy” not “tall guy with the yellow shirt, sits in the third row on the left”. I live in the south so we recognize “black talk”. I don’t quite know how to describe it but we know it. I know some “Bubba’s” with the same speech patterns and I am meeting more and more people of color who speak King’s English better than I do. The black talk is used in our humor to ad “color” without saying that we just added color. I still know people who will use it in the company of our friends like they aren’t going to be offended, it’s a joke. Come on people!
I am sixty-one years old and I still have trouble communicating what I know and think without falling back on all of the ‘black’, ‘colored’, ‘african-american’ labels that we use to describe friends and brothers that we love and care for but remain uncomfortable enough with the labels that we don’t like to use them.
I don’t know where else to take this so I am going to stop. Thanks to Ric for making me think today. Thanks to my friends, regardless of the color of their clay. Somehow, I think when we get to heaven maybe we will all be kind of transparent. You know, just get rid of the issue once and for all. Comments?
Unclewesty, over and out.