12 Comments Add your own

• 1. Mike Carroll  |  March 20th, 2008 at 9:27 am

  I refuse to feel guilty for things that I , or my relatives, have had absolutely nothing to do with. I’ll let you liberals wallow in White Guilt.

• 2. Pat Cunningham  |  March 20th, 2008 at 9:51 am

  You’re not supposed to feel guilty. You’re supposed to understand.

• 3. Kaus  |  March 20th, 2008 at 11:47 am

  May we always remember and never forget. But Martin Luther King Jr. would never speak like that in his Church. He was a true uniter of race. Positive change doesn’t happen with the blame game and anger.

• 4. Pat Cunningham  |  March 20th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

  Kaus: You apparently know little or nothing about Martin Luther King. He was a uniter of people of conscience and good will, but not a “true uniter of the races.” He was confrontational, and his tactics often divided the races, especially in the South. To borrow a phrase, he comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. I met King, marched with him and followed his career closely, and I can tell you that he played “the blame game” to a fare-thee-well — and rightly so. He was widely denounced as unpatriotic, unAmerican and a tool of the commies. He was an agent of radical change and therefore scared the hell out of the conservatives of his time. He was and is my greatest hero.

• 5. Mike Carroll  |  March 20th, 2008 at 12:40 pm

  Pat-I think I understand fairly well thank you. Anyone who has last names like ours should know the history, the prejudice and the discrimination that was directed at “our kind”, both in this country and abroad. I worked for a British firm for 18 years before we were bought by an American company. It never would have occurred to me to ask for “understanding” from my English co-workers because they might have had an ancestor who contributed to the death, starvation and eventual emigration of my forefathers. It wasn’t their doing. It’s history.
  By the way,the 60’s are over. Adjust.

• 6. Pat Cunningham  |  March 20th, 2008 at 12:48 pm

  Racism isn’t over.

• 7. Mike Carroll  |  March 20th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

  I quite agree but I know that racism flows both ways.

• 8. Tom McMahon  |  March 20th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

  The problem for Obama is that sound bite is just too powerful, at the gut level. And the Grandma reference is just creepy.

• 9. Mike Carroll  |  March 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm

  I’ve just watched the evening news. Henceforth, please refer to me as “Typical White Person”.

• 10. Kaus  |  March 20th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

  So you know MLK Pat? I sure would like to hear a comparable statement about anger from MLK on the level of Wright. Your blog is like a black hole…sucking in us neocons for more abuse

• 11. Pat Cunningham  |  March 20th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

  You want anger from Martin Luther King. Try this passage from his famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

  I guess 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 see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; 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 tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that 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 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,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “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. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

• 12. Kaus  |  March 21st, 2008 at 8:21 am

  Thanks for sharing MLK. This anger was valid and justified. Compare that with ‘white men started the aids virus’ of Jeremiah Wright? No way. There is justified black anger, and then there is the blame game.

Leave a Comment

Name Required

Email Required, hidden

Url

Comment

Security Code:

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Trackback this post  |  Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed