However, if it’s an important issue, I attempt to look at it from the other person’s perspective. I think about it, meditate on it, and pray about it until I find discernment and finally peace. I’ve lived long enough that other people have sometimes been successful in changing my stance...with a few exceptions.
White supremacy is one of those exceptions. I will never, and I repeat, never understand how fellow members of my Caucasian race can justify the premise that people of color are inferior and deserve less respect than white people. Whenever I try to understand the perspective of white supremacists, nothing convinces me that it is okay. I simply cannot make sense of it or condone it on any level.
I attended college in Greensboro, North Carolina in the midst of the Civil Rights movement. I clearly recall the sit-ins, the marches, and the riots. We awoke nearly every morning to sirens wailing not far from campus. At night, the sky blazed with flames rising from buildings throughout the city. Not that we could get close to the action. For our safety, we were confined to campus, and our administrators imposed a sun-down curfew for most of my sophomore year.
That curfew posed a problem for music majors. We needed to use the practice rooms after dark. Evening was the only time we weren’t busy with classes and jobs. That meant walking across campus to the music building, something the male students were allowed to do. Remember, this was the sixties. We “young ladies” complained to the administration until they finally gave us permission to be out after dark as long as each of us was accompanied by a male chaperone.
When a disciple of Malcom X came to town, my religion professor was determined to take his students to hear the man speak. I have no idea how he managed it, but with or without permission, we walked to UNC-G, located only a couple blocks from our campus. We had been studying Islam, and our professor was a proponent of the adage, “Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes.”
I will never forget what the speaker said, how he said it, or how afraid I felt as his militant words washed over me. On television, I had heard Dr. King speak with intelligence, reason, and non-violent rhetoric. This was a large, very loud, very angry Black man speaking to--or rather shouting at--a primarily white audience. Honestly, I wondered if we would get out of there alive.
Malcolm X, the founder of the Black Panther movement had been assassinated only three years earlier. With his radical Black Power agenda, he was no Martin Luther King! But I understood. It seemed to him that King and his peaceful protests had failed to bring about significant change, and Black people were fed up. If they couldn’t appeal to decency, justice and their Constitutional rights through peaceful means, what recourse remained for achieving equality? Yes, I understood why this speaker was so angry.
I still understand. I still have no patience or tolerance for racial slurs, racial superiority, segregation based on race, hatred or violence toward another race, or denial of fundamental rights due to race.
If you haven’t ‘walked a mile’ in a Black person's shoes, try this on for size. It is an excerpt from the eloquent letter Dr. King wrote to his fellow clergymen in 1963 from his jail cell in Birmingham.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity…
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; … when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’ when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are); … and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
Have we as a country made any progress since 1963? Do Black Lives Matter today any more than they did in 1863 or 1963? How long must Black Americans wait? I try to understand, but I cannot. Bigotry and racism cannot be understood as anything other than wrong! And so I ask, “When will Lady Liberty’s torch, at last, shine on people of color in the so-called ‘land of the free’?
Please visit my author website: https://www.cindylfreeman.com/
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