Here's the real thing.
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.
Here's the real thing.
It’s called an IQ gap. Let’s spill the truth tea.
At least they could do us the courtesy of actually being black, when they try to stir up hate for white people!
Yeah, I'm always a smart ass with the cops because white people can get away with it, and black people can't. Right.
What a wretched person this Connie Schultz is.
Glad you found it funny. That makes you evil, too.
Always helps things when the vermin self-identify.
Didn't Holder end up the US Attoney General? (Okay, an affirmative action AG, but AG nonetheless.) And isn't Holder a member of the same Democrat party that destroyed the urban black family unit by pushing welfare and handouts to replace.... fathers? So, roughly how many young black men today have fathers who will sit them down and explain things to them the way Holder's father did? I guarantee, neither the corrupt scumbag Holder nor the cow who wrote this column would recognize irony if it threw up on their shoes at a Taco Bell.
Go ride the subway in Harlem if you REALLY wanna feel "conspicuously White".
Anyone who uses the term “White Privilege” is someone who should be forced to stop writing/teaching college (cause it’s all those types) and get a real job.
The Hybrids hate us the worse.
Probably because they had to accept the fact that they were of mixed blood ,not accepted fully by either race they seek acceptance from blacks by being even more racist than the worst of them. The parents of these kids aren’t doing them any favors. Just as Obama hated his mother for birthing him.
Sadly the same corruptocracy we are melding to our governing bodies today.
Obama is not the cause but the result of our fall into lawlessness. Same with Eric Holder.
We have been unwise with our votes and our attention here in middle America.
The rule of law is paramount.
“White Privilege” memes ignore that it was the same “privileged” Whites they bitch about that decided to come from a state of privilege to a state of equality. The average White would love for everyone to act and be treated equally and be judged by their actions/words/character instead of the color of their skin. The race-baiters won’t allow it - the “Elites of Black Privilege” do not want equality - they want to continue to own/control their slaves...
uh... not guilty by reason of insanity.
Live in the ghetto a few days. Then you'll know why they grow up learning to RUN FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER.
That explains a lot,right there.
I have to call BS on that. They ARE the ghetto. No Police administered @$$ whipping ever began with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir”.
She really needs to understand my white rage, which is rooted in six decades of harassment for being white, male, and straight.
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more.
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