I Don't Want Her Country
I'm a white woman, so I probably don't have much authority to comment on issues of race. But, you see, my son is bi-racial, a product, he will proudly tell you, of an Irish mother and a Haitian father. In raising him for the last 15 years, I have gained a perspective on issues of race than I might otherwise have had.
As someone who wants a better racial landscape for my son, there have been several occurrences in the last week that have truly saddened me. It started early in the week when Glen Beck uncovered some "dirt" on Van Jones, President Obama's energy czar. He aired a video in which Mr. Jones refers to Republicans as assholes and publicized that Jones had signed a petition that blamed the government for 9/11.
Then Thursday evening I watched the Boise State, University of Oregon football game. For those of you who don't follow sports, after the game a player from Boise State, Byron Hout, said something obnoxious to an Oregon player named LaGarrette Blount and Blount lost it. He sucker punched the Boise State player and then got into it with the Boise State fans and had to be dragged off of the field
Finally, I got up on Thursday morning to an e-mail from my son's school informing me that if I prefer for my son not to watch a speech by the President of the United States on Tuesday morning, the school will find appropriate alternative activities for him during that time. This is in course in response to the flap over the president's speech asking kids to work hard and stay in school and the right wing meme that President Obama will use the speech to try to "indoctrinate" our children.
Should Van Jones have known better than to call Republicans assholes in a public venue or be more careful what he adds his name to? Yes. Should LaGarrette Blount have known better than to lose his cool, particularly in front of a national audience? Yes. Should President Obama's staff have thought through the first version of his curriculum that went along with his speech and realized that including items like "ask children to write a letter to the president saying what they can do to help him" was probably ill advised? Yes.
I know it doesn't seem like these three items are linked, but for me, I'm starting to wonder if they are all part of the same problem. In all of these instances, I believe, we have black men coming under attack by white people and being asked to pay a disproportionate price for mistakes they may have made.
A few years ago, Dick Cheney told a senator on the senate floor to "go fuck himself." He spent eight years trying to dismantle the Constitution of the United States. Yet I didn't hear Republicans saying things like "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate" as Mike Pence did when he called for Van Jones to resign or be fired. As we now know, Pence got his wish when Van Jones resigned on Saturday night due to what he rightly termed a Republican smear campaign.
So what is Van Jones' crime in proportion to someone like Cheney? He helped found colorofchange.org, the organization that has successfully lobbied for advertisers to drop Glen Beck for saying that our President hates white people. He is a successful black man who, among other accomplishments, started an organization called Green for All, whose goal is to build a green economy while simultaneously lifting citizens out of poverty, many of those citizens from poor and minority communities. In short, he is a threat to the white privilege that people like Mike Pence have grown to enjoy and will do anything to protect.
As for the Blount situation, if you watch the video of the incident, you will see that Hout instigated it. But, guess what? Blount has likely lost any chance of playing football, having been suspended for the rest of the season and Hout will have to run extra laps during practice in the next week. Oh, did I happen to mention that Blount is black and Hout is white? It may not be the case, but what it looks like to lots of people, particularly young African Americans like my son, is that a white guy can start a fight and when a black guy responds it's the black guy who gets punished while the white guy walks away, virtually unscathed.
Now, let's get to our president. Barack Obama is the leader of our country, yet school system after school system is allowing parents to opt out of listening to our president send a positive message to kids about the importance of their education. Of course, other presidents, namely Republican presidents, have been allowed to speak to our children without school systems giving parents the opportunity to opt out. In allowing for this current opt out, what is the message that schools are sending our children, especially African American children like my son? In part, I think, it's that you don't have to respect the president if he's a black man.
So, here's I guess, why I am so saddened. Of course in hind sight I was naïve. But, I thought that the very act of electing a black man for president meant we had turned a corner on the sordid racial past of our country, but now I'm not so sure. The forces out there that will try and hold black people down are strong and loud and dangerous. They will swear up and down to you that their actions have nothing to do with race. And it's difficult to fight because, while we can have suspicions that these fights are, at least in part, about race, we can't really prove it.
We have a long way to go before we can offer my son and other African Americans the country they deserve, a country where they actually have equity. We have a lot of work to do and it's hard work in which we continually question our assumptions and the assumptions of those around us. It's work in which we stand up and make ourselves heard, even when we know it will be uncomfortable for people to hear us.
I think about the woman who cried at a recent town hall meeting "I want my country back." I don't want her country back. Instead, what I want is a country that gives all of its citizens the respect and opportunity they deserve. I want a country that tries to have a better understanding of its own racial heritage and what that heritage implies for all of its citizens. And in that country, we start by giving our president the deference he deserves to give a speech to our children, no matter the color of our president's skin.











