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(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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THOUGHTS ON RACISM
Recently, Barack Obama made an
eloquent speech(even if you disagree, speech was eloquent) on racism in response to his, pastor, Jeremiah Wright's critical remarks.
"History has already judged the slavery issue as absolutely terrible.
To own human beings has to be about the most terrible thing we can imagine. And, the argument that it was the times in which we lived won't hack it either.
In some ways we don't know what we would have done had we lived back there. I sometimes equate it to the most atrocious act of the Vietnam war, My Lai. There is no silver lining to put on it.
However, any combat Vietnam vet can tell you that after days of being harassed with booby traps, knowing that everybody is in somebody's army, soldiers going crazy might happen. Acceptable no, understandable, maybe.
If you were a white southerner and knew that owning slaves which everybody else was doing would help your family to have a better life, would you do it? Meaty questions." White southerners would do well to come to grips with the whole idea of the awfulness of slavery. If we don't do it then we are forever stuck, I think. Is it going to happen? I doubt it.
- a reader of the webzine
Blood Done Signed My Name - a short story of racism in the old South
(short story author comments: The Klu Klux Klan's reign on the south influences a vietnam veteran's reaction to racism from childhood. In the Army and in Nam, his best friend, a young African American, causes greater reflection. He comes home from Nam, eager to start his life over, but the Klan and its influence still reign.)
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