Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Fear Of A Black America

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."

Thomas Jefferson called it didn't he?

In Notes on Virginia he was expressing a colonial era fear which has consequences in our time.

White Americans believed that one day, Black resentment of them because of the inhumane treatment our ancestors received from them during slavery would become so great that we would rise up en masse and slaughter them.

That fear was especially acute in South Carolina, in which the slave population outnumbered the white population of the state at the time.

That fear has persisted through several centuries, a civil war and is an undercurrent feeding current attitudes of White Americans today, especially those on the conservative side.

Any wonder why Whites have an almost fetishistic attachment to guns and are always relentlessly bleating on about the Second Amendment right to bear arms?

Did you note the rhetoric coming from vanilla flavored fundamentalist churches exhorting women to stay at home and have babies?

Did you note the insistent calls from the GOP sheeple opposing the health care plan that we need to take 'my America' back?

Did you note the fear and panic in rural white people's eyes when Sen. Barack Obama overtook Sen. John McCain down the stretch and was elected our president by an electoral vote landslide on November 4?

Have you noted the racist, almost pathological hatred of President Obama, combined with the rise of the birthers and other conspiracy nuts who are in severe denial about the facts that our president was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA?

All of this has an underlying narrative. Fear of a Black America.

So why are y'all so 'scurred'? If you and your ancestors had done the right thing over the last two hundred years you'd have nothing to be scared of.

But no, y'all had to deny slavery reparations, put Jim Crow segregation laws in place, lynch us, deny us political representation, use the police as your segregation stormtroopers, and start riots in our neighborhoods to destroy them any time we started pulling ourselves up by our own bootstrps and started overtaking you economically a la Tulsa 1921.

And you wonder why we get pissed?

It's six months later into President Obama's term, and the national anthem is still The Star Spangled Banner, not Lift Evry Voice and Sing.

The flag is still red, white and blue with red and white stripes and 50 white stars on a blue field. The Republican Party hasn't been abolished, although you're doing a damned good job on your own of making yourselves irrelevant.

The country has begun to climb out of the hole that your Resident in Thief and his reverse Robin Hoods put it in.

Within 24 hours of President Obama's election on November 4, it erased 8 years of negativity and enmity the world had built up for us thanks to Bush misadministration misguided foreign policies.

So chill out. You haters lost fair and square. We didn't need the Supreme Court, Diebold electronic voting machine chicanery, massive voter suppression tactics or faked riots to beat you either.

So relax and enjoy it as our cum laude Ivy league 'ejumacated' president, a Dem congressional majority and progressive peeps clean up your mess.

Watch as we provide the leadership, reality based programs and problem solving initiatives that have not materialized under greed-is-good failed conservative leadership. And watch the country improve before the 2012 election cycle.

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