"Ta-Nehisi can really be a fun read sometimes."
Well, he/she/it said one thing correctly - he/she/it doesn't get it....
I just finished reading a book by Ken Hamblin, "Pick a better country", an unassuming colored guy shares his view of America, which I highly recommend. Ken is an great American, living proof that this experiment in FREEDOM called the USA, does WORK. His radio show used to be on here in Jacksonville, Florida till a couple years ago. He called himself 'The Black Avenger'. Many of the things being discussed in this thread are covered in depth in Ken's book.
In one part of the book, he shared an email from a listener who shared that while working in an office on a military base, a young black couple came in to apply for an ID for their daughter. The clerk asked for the daughter's name.
The husband said it a couple times, but the clerk couldn't grasp the name. She asked him to spell it phonetically. He did: SHAA-TEA-AAD. The clerk turned to her computer to input the name and asked the father to if "SHAATEAAAD" was the exact spelling on her birth certificate.
He replied, "No, it's S-H-I-T-H-E-A-D".
The clerk about died. "How could someone allow their daughter to have a name like that, much less allow it to be placed on official documents like birth certificate, driver's license and the like?", she thought. It was beyond her grasp that the father took pride in giving his daughter an 'African' name, even though it appeared very different to non-Afro-centrists. i.e. - regular folk.
I thought maybe this story was an exaggeration, and I shared it with my son, who does collection work via phone. He said he had seen that same first name on a work order and ignored it, thinking it was a joke, and he didn't want to blow the collection opportunity by calling and asking to speak to 'Shithead'!