Posted on 07/27/2013 4:48:50 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In 2002, Michael Green extracted a single promise from me during the year I spent reporting about his life after he spent 13 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.
Green, who is African-American, knew I’d be giving a lot of speeches about his story, including at high schools in Cleveland. He saw an opportunity to save lives.
“Tell the boys,” he said to me over and over. “Tell the boys this comes from me: If the police stop you, don’t ever run. Take your hands out of your pockets. Immediately. Put your hands over your head. Immediately. Stand perfectly still, and keep your opinions to yourself.”
“You have to promise,” he said. “You have to warn them.”
I’ve written about this promise a number of times over the years. I do that because I want to keep my word and share the warning in as large a forum as possible. If I’m honest with myself, though, I have to admit I also do it because I want to feel a little less guilty about my unearned privilege as a white woman. As a white mother, to be precise. My worries never rival those of most African-American mothers. Most days, I’d rather not think about that. Again, such privilege.
A decade ago, neither Green nor I knew to warn about the likes of George Zimmerman. He was no cop, despite his fancy notions of himself as a civilian enforcer. Instead, he was empowered by a law cooked up by the National Rifle Association and a certainty in his right to pursue an unarmed teenager who fit his description of a suspect. Some warned that this could happen, but we all should have seen it coming.
Earlier this month, in a speech to the NAACP, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder described a family ritual all too familiar to many in the audience. His father sat him down. The talk his father gave, Holder said, was “about how, as a young black man, I should interact with the police, what to say and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way that I thought was unwarranted. Now, I’m sure my father felt certain at that time that my parents’ generation would be the last that had to worry about such things for their children.”
Some family traditions just won’t die in this country. After Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, Holder sat his own 15-year-old son down.
“This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down,” he said. “But as a father who loves his son and who is more knowing in the ways of the world, I had to do this to protect my boy. I am his father, and it is my responsibility not to burden him with the baggage of eras long gone but to make him aware of the world that he must still confront. This is a sad reality in a nation that is changing for the better in so many ways.”
Ever since the verdict was announced and Zimmerman walked free, I’ve been trying to write this column. How can I not have something to say about this?
Yet every approach feels wrong.
I feel conspicuously white — and defensive — embarrassingly eager to talk about how I raised my children to be better than their parents and their grandparents before them, how they never see race before face, how they never think to describe their friends by the color of their skin.
Just saying that out loud makes me wince. Oh, great. Another obnoxious white liberal celebrating her own good intentions.
I keep fighting the urge to explain myself to my black friends, to offer evidence of how I could have turned out worse than this clumsy version of me.
There are many, many times when I miss my father, but this week isn’t one of them. I’m glad not to have that conversation that rips open old wounds and launches another round of estrangement. He once grounded me for an entire summer after he found out about my seventh-grade crush on a black boy.
“We don’t mix,” he yelled, eyes bulging, fists flexing at his side. I look back on that summer as the first time I realized my beloved father was wrong, just wrong, and I no longer wanted to be just like him.
After more than a decade as a columnist, I know what’s coming. Just telling that story will trigger another round of angry emails. Some white readers will demand to know what kind of daughter says such things about her father.
On and on it goes.
As a young WHITE male I instinctively knew this. Why do young black males need to be told?
funy the duke lacrosse case wsn’t mentioned in her discusion of false rape stories.
oh that’s because the guys were white and had their lives destroyed. by blacks and whites like this b1tch together. and they reveled in destroying those white young mens’ lives.
I urge Connie to go immediately down to the corner of 12th and Monroe in Lynchburg, find overturn and climb on a box, and loudly apologize for being white over and over until the clock strikes 12am.
Then she will find forgiveness.
Mixing produces the like of Barack Obama. You decide if America needs more of him.
Hey 2nd, thanks for the link. I’ll read up on it a little later.
I had this theory going back to NYU. I always knew it was white envy.
I graduated a Japanese college wayyy back when. I can tell you, asians never really had a feeling of white envy. Their attitude was: “Yea, we can do that, sit down over there and watch.”
Commodore Perry’s second trip to Japan, he brought with him a present for the Emperor, it was a model train set. The size and kind you see at amusement parks.
The Japanese took one look at it, and declared that all of Japan will be connected with itself.
White Privilege, what the heck is that? The Japanese knew a rally good idea when they saw it. They adopted it, and it became their own.
Today, you can walk 15 to 20 minutes AT MOST, and hop a train to ANYWHERE in the country.
Japan boasts the most sophisticated and elaborate train system in the world. “Damn that white boy Perry, charged up Tokyo bay and held us back again!”
I suggest that MS Schultz alleviate her position of white privilege by giving up all that she is not entitled to including her job to some poor deserving non white.
Can you remember your Dad telling you, “When I am talking to you, take your hands out of your pockets and stand up straight?” That’s where we learned it. Today only 30 percent of the black kids have live in dads.
Connie Schultz is a vile leftist who has slandered her father in order to misrepresent a jury trial so as to try to inflame race riots that can be whipped up into a general rebellion that can be used to justify martial law to enable the communist Democrats to seize the country and suspend the Constitution and destroy a free America once and for all.
Her level of spiritual, moral, legal and psychological treason and sedition is literally a rape orgy of disinformation. She is not merely a liar, not merely a traitor, and not merely evil - she is satanic. And she knows it, and she likes it.
She is a demon.
:: spit ::
Zap on the nose. It took the Emperor to pull together his best scholars, and send them forth to study and bring back to Japan all that western civilization had to offer. And they did.
Japan never sent anyone to Africa as far as I know, and I know a few things about the Meiji Restoration.
So did we, from our parents, Boy Scouts and from school, in the 50s. Police were our friends, back then; many involved in Scouting Troops/Exploring Posts/NRA competition and career counseling. We went to school with their kids; we were neighbors and fellow churchgoers.
Hey Bald,
You got that so right. Rhodesia was once the bread basket of all Africa and then some. White settlers went there, and found a fertile land inhabited by not too many primitives.
They farmed the region and made it one of the most productive pieces of land.
A black commie pig, with the help of hoards of wiggers, snatched that hard work away from those people who made the land prosperous.
Today, Rhodesia starves. And the once productive lands lie in rot. But HEY! The blacks can camp out on it an wizz and defecate on it to their hearts content.
NEVER MIND that they are STARVING!
Black privilege is being able to assault a white person starting with a sucker punch,slamming his head on a concrete sidewalk,because you felt “disrespected” and when your victim kils you to save his own life, you become a National Hero in the eyes of a racist black President and Attorney General and a Corrupt Liberal Media.
In other words you are never judged negatively for the content of your character but always favorably for the color of your skin.
If Connie feels that opportunities were bestowed upon her due to her whiteness and opportunities are withheld to others because they’re not white, then Connie should immediately quit her job and demand that a black person be hired in her stead. Unless Connie does this, then she’s just being a blowhard hypocrite who’s opinion I couldn’t care less about.
So he felt empowered... and was acting within his rights... and the author spins this into evil... even though they would celebrate it and excuse it if the victim were white.
Your premise is incorrect. In 1500, Japan was at least as technologically advanced as Europe. A hundred and forty years later they decided to isolate themselves and they stopped technological advancement. They and China were cases of arrested development.
Sub-sahara Africa never reached that level of Japan in 1500, until Europe conquered Africa and put it under colonial rule.
Japan and China had a huge head start on Africa in culture, education, an established history of government and law. China is only now starting to catch up as they slowly figure out how to get rid of the crippling effects of communism under Mao.
I think Africa could do well, but they have been severely crippled by that nasty European import, leftism. India was crippled by it for a 50 years, and still suffers from the remnants.
You are correct if you think that black people could do well, if they would enthusiastically adopt western civilization. They have been greatly hampered from doing so by the mythology of leftists.
I realized my beloved father was wrong, just wrong, and I no longer wanted to be just like him.
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Yet she is married to a White guy so something her Daddy told her stuck in her liberal brain.
I have to agree with Dad....he just used fewer words but I always told my kids that life and marriage are hard enough without marrying outside your race, religion or culture. Love can conquer all but it won’t be easy.
Who the hell is this bitch?!
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