I share this from my friend Darnell Hawkins a Champion among men committed to challenging what is. My FB friends. All of you know that I have been a self-appointed warrior against all that I perceive as racism. So, let me share a story about this shared video exchange to place it in context. The person asking the question is my great nephew who lives here in Arkansas. Although in early middle school, he scores at high school levels on all standardized tests and has the best grades in his current class, and has achieved this feat throughout his schooling. He has also excelled in several sports. A few months ago, he had an unfortunate encounter with a new transfer student arriving at his school. The student informed him that she doubted at first that he was the student others were talking about as the best in the class. She siad she doubted such because he is black. As with so many young African Americans, those kinds of predictable and unavoidable early exposures to American racist attitudes can be devastating and self-perception altering. For my generation, who went to segregated elementary and secondary schools, such exposures, at least at the truly interpersonal levels, came later on. For me they took place during the first year of college. Indeed most memorable for me is an incident that happened just after arrival on campus for the very first time. In an era of integrated education, they tend to come much earlier, and with potentially much more harmful and enduring impacts. So, while Cornel West was here in town giving the Winthrop Rockefeller lecture ( honoring the governor who fought against our states racist ways) at the local historically black state university, my attentive nephew in the audience stood up and posed the question you hear and which got the inspiring response you hear from West. From Ferguson, to elementary schools like his, to Colgate University (where a white student said recently in anonymous internet posting that the proof that blacks are inferior is shown by the very fact that blacks were enslaved by whites), and on to the White House and Congress itself, we must be vigilant in fighting all forms of racial intolerance in the US. If not, we will fail as a nation.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:58:13 +0000
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