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.
The source for this drivel is my rag of a local newspaper. Any given time, the front page will feature articles about “racial healing” and “dialogues about race” in the city. More often than not, that same front page has pictures of local black citizens. Anyone from outside Lynchburg would assume the town is mainly black. So I am sure the News and Advance staff went into throes of ecstasy over this woman’s self-hating crap.
I’m glad her email address was included.
HA! Or maybe the corner of Fifth Street....oh, excuse me, Martin Luther King Blvd. /s
I say this twit still doesn't realize that "Stand Your Ground" wasn't invoked by the defense.
That is a pathetic pagefull of hand-wringing drivel.
Pulitzer Prize winning? Really???
Dear Mark,
Disagree with you thoroughly. Especially Japan in 1500. That was when they let the Jesuits and Portuguese have a toe hold. They really did NOT like western civ and did NOT have the technology of the west. They IMPORTED match locks, but did not manufacture them or even understand them much. The shogunate shunned everything and anything western.
However, it is late on a Saturday night, and I am tired and have had a few.
BUT,
I would love to have a spirited debate with you on another day!
I look forward to it!
Have a really good weekend, and I’ll cross swords with you next week!
In my local paper today she writes about she and her husband just bought a house in Cleveland. She moans about Cleveland getting a bad rap because of all of the high-profile crime against women. She reports that the mayor has appointed an independent commission composed of all women and that “slowly but steadily, real change has come to Cleveland’s police department”. This week a pitcher for the Texas Rangers was sucker punched by three “yutes” just outside his downtown hotel. He reported the incident but the police told him there would be no report and that it happens all of the time. Bet she won’t be walking around downtown Cleveland at night anytime soon.
From the twit's article:
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.
I say she writes this chit just to draw angry email to assuage her deeply embedded guilt at being white.
Based on what she wrote, there is no possible way to climb out of the chamber pot of racism. I am fully prepared to judge the twit by the content of her character. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
I wonder where we would have been as a society if "al & jesse", the justice brothers, had plumbers or carpenters...anything but the race pimps they are. Maybe two other of satan's helpers would have stepped up to the plate, who knows.
I don't think this is a recent picture, but at one time she was one of the better looking "progressives." I don't think her picture in the newspaper never looked that good, so they did a nice makeup job on her.
No one has mentioned that she is married to Senator Sherrod Brown D-OH.
Attaboy, Willie.
You probably know better than I.
There was another story posted here a while back about a Detroit granny who got off a bus and went after a purse snatcher. She fired 11 rounds. She didn’t hit the guy but she did get her purse back and then berated all the “men” on the bus for just sitting there.
“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.”
- Sir/Ma’am, this is hilarious. I admire the number of mental images stuffed in there. A thing of beauty, really.
1. Privilege is earned. Many Americans died for the privileges she apparently thinks are completely undeserved by today’s Americans who are not criminals nor trying to act like criminals, nor caught with other people’s jewelry and burglary tools.
2. Our family had the same “talk” with our blond, blue-eyed offspring when they started going out in cars — that one false move around a cop could absolutely ruin their lives — that it’s not Mayberry any more. Where has this woman been hiding?
Is that where the projects are, behind the police station?
I think most boys have that sort of talk at some time or another.
Hard to do if there is no father around.
She may think that Western culture stole all the prosperity from everyone else. It is a common leftist delusion.
That's a very good point. There seems to be a liberal talking point that suggests young white males are never stopped by police, and never have to deal with unpleasant variations of that kind of encounter. Of course we all know that is nonsense. Young men of all races get stopped by the police for one reason or another. And the overwhelming majority of them instinctively know how to behave since they learned what to do from their parents.
And we had to address our parents as "Sir" and "Ma'am." (Apparently Barbara Boxer never got that memo.)
That photo of Mrs. Brown is so airbrushed it makes her look like one of Madame Tussaud’s wax figures.
Connie is a wrinkled sweat hog in real life.
I thought I recognized that name.
She’s a real loon!
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