“Racing” For Power
Deborah Venable
03/31/08
On
March 18, 2008, Barack Obama made “the speech” where he attempted to address his
pastor’s obvious racist and anti-American views.
Obama
began his speech by cherry picking the Preamble to the Constitution thus:
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
I think the rest of that line, (there is no period after the word union) is far more important.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
He ended his speech with these words:
“It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the
jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And
as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred
and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in
Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.”
I
beg to differ that these things would be the starting point to perfection, much
less promote or provide any of the other things that the Preamble states.
Obama
is first and foremost a liberal politician, hence his fascination with
“perfection” achieved through government.
He referred back to the Founders in his speech, which included this:
“The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.”
This
does not show that he ever really made an attempt to understand the caliber of
human beings our Founders were, their vision for their posterity, or the
struggle they endured to bring forth the foundations of our government. Interwoven in his “understanding” of
America’s beginnings is that “stain” of this “nation’s original sin of
slavery”, which seems to color his perception about everything else.
These
men, these Founders of American government were themselves freed slaves of
tyranny only because they had broken their own chains of bondage.
Once
and for all, can we come to intellectual agreement that African descendants do
not have the market cornered on slavery?
Many people are enslaved in the world right now and they do not all have
black skin. I would venture to say that
the majority of the slaves in the world today, and even during our country’s
founding, do not and did not have black skin!
The
“stain” of slavery is an imperfect human stain – not one that is exclusively
American. To hear Obama and his
preacher tell it, you would think that America had invented this “original sin”
and perpetuated it throughout the rest of the world.
I
am not attempting to “bleach” out this stain – slavery was wrong then and it is
wrong now and everybody with a brain knew it then and knows it now. But slaves have not been legally held in
this country for a very long time.
Nothing is owed to the descendants of African slaves that is not owed to
every other race in this country – a continuation of the most “perfect”
governing principles ever set down on parchment.
In
a continuing attempt to change that “unfinished” document, politicians have
lost for us many of the freedoms that the original was designed to
protect. The tradeoff the Founders made
that allowed slavery to continue in order to preserve States’ rights was done
with the sure knowledge that America would quickly evolve beyond slavery if
moral rule continued to flourish.
Obama’s speech indicated that this decision was made with a careless
inconsideration of future generations.
That is absurd!
Any
time man has tried to force God-given free will through a sieve of equity via
mandate, disastrous consequences have been the result. So, when the Constitution was written, even
though the moral men of that time knew that slavery was an issue that certainly
could be addressed, and as some thought, should be, they eventually realized
that the inequity of forcing the issue at that time would be disastrous to
sections of the country that depended upon the continued labors of slaves already
purchased, provided for, and for which there was no readily available
replacement in their minds. Because the
Founders trusted in the goodness of men’s souls to lead this new nation toward
the eventual eradication of slavery, they did not mandate abolition of slavery
in the original document or amendments.
Likewise,
they did not mandate that women would have an equal say in their government
either, but that does not mean that descendants of those originally
discriminated against have any right today to expect reparations from the other
gender.
So
the Constitution was put to the ultimate test less than a hundred years after
it was written, and the tenth amendment was largely ignored – hence a war
ensued – a war that brought with it the abolition of slavery with the
thirteenth amendment. But the abolition
of slavery did not result in acceptance of equality for the freed slaves –
because it was a forced mandate.
Before
the beginning of the Civil War, 250,000 slaves had already been voluntarily
freed. The “stain” was already fading,
but the powerful application of force tore a hole in the fabric of everyone’s
freedom, and made the Constitution forever vulnerable to inequitably applied
mandate.
The
great majority of Americans have not learned anything from this horribly
expensive lesson because the truth has been buried deeper with each passing
generation.
A
better understanding of the slavery issue and the war that forced an end to it
is contained in a Patriot’s Corner Page about Robert E. Lee here on this site.
A
scant hundred years after the abolition of slavery, black and white Americans
were still embroiled in a bitter fight for civil rights – a fight that had come
to the brink of such civil unrest at racial discrimination that the same
mistake was made once again. Forced
integration was now the law of the land.
We no longer had the right to decide for ourselves if we would advocate
separatism in any form if we were members of the white race. Equal but separate was not possible –
unless, evidently, you were a member of the black race. (No wonder Obama chose to accentuate his
black half and only bring up his white half if it benefited him to do so.)
I
did not live during the time when slavery was legal in this country and neither
did anyone else alive today, but I did live through the chaotic mid twentieth
century and I saw first hand the racism and discrimination in BOTH races.
I
was raised in the Deep South – that area of the country that carries an unjust
stigma for its treatment of blacks. We
called them “colored folks or Negroes, which comes out the hated N word in a
careless Southern drawl more often than not.
As I think back, my immediate relatives usually pronounced the word,
“Nigra” instead of the more offensive form.
(In case anyone hasn’t noticed, folks in the south do have a distinctive
way of speaking.) I bring all this up
to make an important point: in the space of two generations, the word, “Negro”
has undergone somewhat of a rewrite in dictionary definition – hence the
offensive N word is prohibited speech.
If you do not believe me, look up the word “Negro” in both an old and a
new dictionary. You will see that an
additional meaning has been added to the new one, which labels it as
offensive. We had more freedom of
speech back then, and seldom passed the word under a lens of political
correctness, but no one can get away with that now – if he is white.
I
was also aware of the terminology that black folks used to describe white
folks. Back in my youth, the most
popular term was “cracker”. I think
that has been upgraded to “honky” now, but both were intentionally
“disparaging” terms. They are, however,
not on the endangered list of English language words, nor so universally
prohibited speech as the N word.
Most
white folks in those days (where I lived) were separatists in that they
generally went along with the idea that the different races could be cordial to
each other without having to be forced into constant social contact with each
other. Most black folks felt the same
way. They had schools and churches that
were as good as whites’. They generally
had businesses that catered to their own race, but you would see them in ample
supply, whenever you went into town, shopping and working in stores and
theaters, etc. The theaters separated
black patrons to the balcony, but more often than not, my family chose to sit
in that area also. We were tolerated if
we kept to ourselves in the front row.
Wherever there were public restrooms, they were marked “white” and
“colored”. Same with drinking fountains
usually. A very few of the restaurants
were marked, “for whites only” or some variation of that sign, but I was never
told that white folks were better than black folks. I did not learn that from my parents, my schools, or my
church.
Now,
we have been told that the “black experience” of those trying times somehow justifies
the bitterness against whites that comes out in the in the attitudes and speech
of some current black leaders, such as Reverend Wright. Okay, I can buy that. But, what about the “white experience” of
these trying times? What does that
justify? Does it justify never ending
racism? That is the message that is
being sent and it will continue to resound throughout future generations if we
can’t put an end to this racing for power.
My
brother and I were both born at home and the same midwife helped with our
delivery. She was known,
affectionately, to us as Negro Mattie.
She was part of our family throughout my early childhood. When she passed away, I was heartbroken
because I truly loved her. Why did we
“label” her as Negro Mattie you might ask?
Simple. Because I had an aunt
named Mattie, so it was done to belay confusion in speaking about them. I am almost certain that Mattie, (not my
aunt) coined the label herself. My
brother wrote about Mattie in one of his first published articles on this
site. Even though I was quite young
when she died, I still vividly remember her and miss her in the same way I miss
all the people I have loved and lost to mortality.
The
last year I went to high school was the first year of forced integration. While there had not been the highly
publicized race problems in my hometown, I was certainly aware that they were
going on mere miles away. After all, I
lived eighty miles north of Birmingham, and the governor at the time was George
Wallace. My parents were not big
Wallace fans even though they were Democrats.
They were worried that his attitude was going to “upset the apple cart”
of our otherwise racially serene existence – and they were right. Up until that last year of school for me, we
had always purchased our own schoolbooks each year. We would be careful with them and then sell them the next year to
help with the purchase of the next ones.
Wallace changed all that with state supplied textbooks. I did not realize it at the time, but that
was the beginning of the end of an otherwise pretty good public school
system. With forced integration and
state supplied texts, the government, both state and federal, had begun the
stranglehold on our educational system.
Bussing
had begun, and folks, both black and white, were not happy. I made a point of befriending the two black
students who were enrolled at my high school.
They were miserable and did not want to be there. The government had made their parents an
offer they couldn’t resist though – a bribe to enroll their daughters in a
previously white school. When I have
related this story – that blacks had to be bribed to send their children to
white schools, people do not believe it!
I’m sure it was not that way everywhere, but it certainly WAS my own
personal experience.
I
left home in 1968, only returning for short visits until I moved back here late
in 2002. In that thirty-four years I
lived and worked all over the continental United States. My husband was raised in Pennsylvania and we
spent a great deal of time living in Illinois, Arizona, and California. We have known people from every state and
worked in a good many of them since we both had jobs that required a lot of
travel. All of my children were born
and raised for most of their lives in the West – California and Arizona. I supply this background to make a point:
the effects of forced integration and the previous race relations up until that
point were very different depending on what part of the country you lived
in.
In
the northeast, relations were much more tense than those I experienced growing
up. I remember my parents talking about
the trouble that “Yankees” were going to stir up if they continued to force
their influence on the south. Indeed,
the civil rights protests in the south were always infiltrated and started by
people who traveled here from further north.
Ask anyone living anywhere else, though, and they will tell you that the
South was the catalyst in racial discrimination and unrest. Period.
Fighting that awful war some one hundred years earlier did nothing to
remove the unfair stigma placed on the “plantation states” even though slave
holding and racial discrimination was spread far beyond Dixieland.
Much
attention has been brought to bear on the Tuskegee Experiment mentioned in some
of Pastor Wright’s raving sermons. Yes,
that took place at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. That institute was founded by Booker T. Washington – a black
man. It was largely staffed by black
medical personnel, and the study was conducted by the federal Public Health
Service. The subjects of the study were
the poorest of black men already infected with the terrible venereal disease,
syphilis. They were not “deliberately
infected” as the pastor stated. I
certainly do not defend that awful project because treatment that might have
saved many of them WAS deliberately withheld.
That was inexcusable, but there can be no doubt that blacks as well as
whites were complicit in the “experiment” and the subsequent cover up.
Wright
has also accused the government of “inventing” AIDS as a way to wipe out the
black race. Well, I guess it was an
invention gone wrong then because it certainly hasn’t been too picky about
attacking whites and other minorities who share the risky lifestyles of its
victims. When the AIDS epidemic first
reared its ugly head I distinctly remember some white folks thinking that
Africans had deliberately unleashed the plague on the rest of the world so that
everyone would “feel Africa’s pain.”
The
accusations of America’s guilt for the attacks of 911 – “chickens coming home
to roost” – have certainly been uttered by preachers other than Wright and
politicians other than Obama, but they should be ridiculed by every American
with a brain, and certainly any American who professes hope for America’s
future.
Yes,
Senator Obama, we all have our stories, but I believe the most important thing
is being true to your own story.
Telling people the truth defines working toward the “more perfect union”
– not inventing rationale to support contrived grievances for one group or the
other. The most important statement
that this speech contained was this:
“. . . and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
God
bless you, Senator, for if you truly believe that, you are a patriotic
American. You wouldn’t have needed to
say anything else. The American people
of all races have endured so much scrutiny, so many unfair attacks, both
external and internal, and have responded by continuing to make progress and
share that progress with the world. We
are the most charitable people on earth.
Just ask any former enemy that we have ever gone to battle with.
I
truly do not understand why any American would stand at the podium of any
public gathering, in any classroom, or at any pulpit in this country and
attempt to convey guilt or contempt on anyone hearing his message that America
deserves anything but vigilant defense against anyone or anything that would
defile this country.
That, perhaps, is what Senator Obama should have said in his famous speech! “Racing” for power is not attractive or useful for one who would lead the greatest nation on earth.