"Thurmond and Sharpton: Past is still present"
Old story - ancient, in fact. Didn't this come out last week some time? The week before? Whatever.
What makes it new again, at least for me, is the commentary in today's hometown Houston Chronicle by the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts, Jr.:
Somewhere, the gods are amused.
Sharpton is not. He has pronounced himself torn by conflicting emotion: humiliation, anger, pride and, above all, shock.
The reaction from Thurmond's family, meanwhile, has been characterized by that curious shrug of shoulders, that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal.
"I don't feel one way or the other," Thurmond's 74-year-old niece, Doris Strom Costner, told the Washington Post.
"I have no comment," Paul Thurmond, the senator's youngest son, told the New York Daily News.
Somewhere, all the other the race-baiters like Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton are also amused.
Note: Strangely missing from the Wikipedia entry linked above is the Sharpton Jew-baiting incident which resulted in riots and dead Hasidim in Crown Heights during 1991. Also missing, the incitement to burn Freddie's Fashion Mart in Harlem during 1995, resulting in yet more deaths. So much for Wikipedia's previously impeccable reputation for completeness. Oh, it also omits his 1983 brush with the FBI, reported in 2002 along with his apparently still-unsuccessful $1 billion lawsuit against HBO for having aired the tape of the event, after which he allegedly turned into an FBI informer to avoid investigation for involvement in drug transactions on behalf of Don King and the NY Mob. A complete and total piece of
Anyway, Pitts seems surprised to find that Thurmond's descendants don't feel personally responsible, or even embarrassed, by the actions of people whose lives predate their own by 100 years or more. Imagine that! What the hell's wrong with those people?
Sharpton feels humiliation (as though Thurmond had owned him?), anger (for what, I don't know), pride, and shock. Those last two, I can understand - it's not often that a demagogue of his stature is handed an issue, on a silver platter, that his mouth-breathing fellow travelers in the "professional outrage for shake-downs, fun, and profit" community, if nobody else, can take seriously and run with. So he's equally shocked and proud.
Normally, you see, such agitators have to incite or invent their own, well, agita.
Pitts continues:
Of course, by this point, maybe he has stopped listening. Maybe you have, too. Mention of that 350 years tends to have that effect.Hence the ambivalence — "nervous chuckles," reported the Orlando Sentinel of a visit to Thurmond's hometown — that greeted last week's news in some quarters. Small wonder. It removed the shield of abstract. It put a face on the thing. And the danger is that if we can imagine that face, we can imagine others.
Condoleezza Rice purchased as breeding stock.
Oprah Winfrey raped on a nightly basis.
Will Smith, his back split open by a whip.
Sen. Barack Obama living with the same rights under the law, the same expectation of dignity, as a horse or a chair.
We spend a lot of time running from this. But we never escape.
Lost on Pitts is the utter absurdity, in today's world or any world that's existed in the past 50 years, for ANY of the things he lists as bogeymen to actually occur. So we're "running from" putative, but completely imaginary, future shit that would never, ever occur anywhere but in the fevered brains of those who can't bear to see the racial divide bridged.
And if Pitts, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the myriad others who make all or part of their livings being the agents for the perpetually aggrieved have their way, damned straight, we'll never escape.
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This is an interesting turn
This is an interesting turn of phrase:
"...that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal."
First, we are European-Americans.
Second, it's not helpful to make sweeping generalizations about ethnic groups. Right, homes?
Finally, it is impossible for slavery to "get personal", as I have never owned a human being. If you want to get into the business of indicting descendants for ancestors' crimes, go for it- you'll find my people among the dregs of New England society for at least 250 years, and owning very little beyond the neccessities for survival.
And finally finally, tell me about how I've benefited from our national shame. That's what typically follows once the rest of it has been deflected, right? How all living Americans have benefited from slavery?
I'd love to hear about it- tell me about how as a little boy with only my mother, with welfare cheese on my breath, Goodwill on my back and KMart jeepers on my feet we benefited; about ducking landlords and moving every year or so; about how it benefited my stepfather, a local craftsman who learned his trade as a kid, struggled to make a living with it, and died $100,000 in debt to The Man; tell me how it benefited my education, the one I had to join the Army and then borrow from the government to afford- which will be paid off sometime around 2017; tell me me how it benefited my own career, working for non-profits, helping schools grow and maintain their fiscal health, a portion of which is devoted precisely to helping applicants from disadvataged backgrounds afford college in the first place.
Yeah, I really made out.
Actually, those things can
Actually, those things can and do still occur in places in Africa where Brown meets Black.
Damn. I should have known I
Damn. I should have known I was over-broad in my geography, and of course meant to say "in today's America, where skin pigmentation differs by {some arbitrary amount of whatever the unit of measure is for skin pigmentation}".
I regret the misstatement.
It doubt that anyone who has
It doubt that anyone who has stood on the battlefield at Gettysburg and read the staggering number of those killed on memorial after memorial can say we haven't paid for slavery.