This thing about race!

The first really rememberable thing in this writers life involved race. We remember the young black man who worked for my father after he had been given a second chance at life after being paroled from the state prison here in southern Illinois. He took that chance and combined that with young sexual energy and alcohol and a wayward friend to go out and rape a young attractive white woman probably no older than himself and ended up killing her mother in the process. He hid out in my fathers loft in his place of business until he finally ended up giving himself up about ten days later. Although neither one of these black people were lynched for what they did, the black community in my home town was burned out of their homes by enraged and liquored up white citizens who turned Vienna into a generational lily white community with their violent act.

The black people in that small sub community of Vienna were completely innocent but they suffered, they and their children, for what some of their race had done. And, it still goes on like that today. Wed listened to one of the morning talk shows that devoted a part of its air time to things like being pulled over for something called driving while black, a situation where black people are rather routinely pulled over and forced to submit to a police frisking simply because of the color of their skin as they drive along the highways and byways of this nation. And then we have columnists writing in the nations prominent newspapers describing wearing a hoody as being a reason to stop and frisk because, in their words, everybody knows that a hoody is the uniform of crime. This is nothing more than racial profiling in print! And then there was the speech by Attorney General Eric Holder in which he described having “the conversation� with his young black son to be aware and submissive when he, in his turn, is subjected to some of the things that we have mentioned above. Holder had hoped that we might have advanced as a nation to the point where we might not need for black citizens to have to have that sort of conversation. But we have not.

There is very little argument that there is crime in the black community. There is also very little argument that the average black male has a one in three chance of being incarcerated for an extended period at sometime during his adult life. There is some argument that if Trayvon Martin had killed George Zimmerman that he would have been immediately arrested and probably would have spent much of the rest of his time in the state prison system. They waited over thirty days to arrest George Zimmerman and only did it after massive outcry from around the nation. Eric Holder also noted that there are thirty one states including my state of Illinois that now have some form of stand your ground laws that promote situations in which further violence can occur with little chance of any lasting ramifications resulting from said violence. And, just as the Sandy Hook shootings of all those six and seven year olds have mainly resulted in higher gun sales, the Martin death will probably result in there being more public awareness of stand your ground and more needless deaths in the African American community by those who now know that they need fear little from the law for what they might do with their guns. The average citizen of this nation is never going to get involved in this sort of thing but we best remember that an average is simply the sum of many differences and there will be those who will now do what George Zimmerman has done because of the publicity that he did it.

We must confess that we know that black people are black. It is hard not to notice that and to sometimes draw judgments from it because not only are black people black, they also act like black people. They came to us from a tribal form of society and many of them retain that tribal form of personality which is far different in many respects from the average white way of acting. And, through the struggles of the civil rights era, they feel, in many respects, more inclined to be free and open about who they are than they did when we saw, as a child at the local fair, a large white man call a young black child over to him and give him some money to go get the white person a lemonade, identifying him as “boy� in the process. The child acted as if it was a normal course of events but we still remember it to this very day as we do other slights that have an indelible print on our mind. We must also confess that we know the vernacular of race and race hatred. It is like a hated thing in our self that we must sometimes struggle with when we see things that some black people do that we do not like nor understand. But these things happen in the white community just as well and we simply feel a sense of rage when we see what some white people do. Age and wisdom have not abated that in our mind.

The only thing left from that burned out black community in Vienna for many years was the white clapboard church in the south part of town where they felt free to worship and express their inner feelings without the threat of reprisals from the white community that surrounded them. It is almost pathetic really that these people of color wanted to have their church among the white’s in the first place and perhaps it reflected their deep desire to be like those that they knew that they could never resemble in any sort of way. There was a striving there that white people will never know. As the black community in Vienna crossed the creek that separated them from white Vienna, each week to attend that church it was like a temporary crossing of the proverbial Jordon river to a place, like Moses, that they knew that they could never live.

We have a sense of what is right and what is wrong and that sense is not affected by the color of ones skin and we feel that many Americans possess the same traits. It is just possible that they have not, at so early and impressionable an age, seen some of the things that we have seen. We remember standing at the door of our fathers business as a child and watching as black families were brought by the police to the local justice of the peace who happened to be housed next door. They were charged fines of up to three hundred dollars which, if they could not pay, simply resulted in having their car, their only real possession as they attempted to use it to flee the south for the industrial north, permanently taken away from them, leaving them adrift, alone and embarrassed in a truly alien world that was also very hostile toward them.

We tell you these things because they went on and, to some degree, still go on in this world today in one form or another and we want you to try to understand the collective viewpoint that so many black people stare at you from. And we see today attempts to knock the props out from under black and other poor citizens by taking away the very bread from their mouths as food stamps and other programs are curtailed by the very people who hate them so. But we also want you to know that there is a difference between being white and poor and being black and poor. We remember the member of the weekly Bible study at the Marion Ministerial Alliance who was black and who asked the very incisive questions that so enlightened the proceeding for so long who recently passed away after a long illness. She worshiped the same God as the rest who care to worship do and she would tell you if she were alive to do it that he will pass judgment on everyone in the end. And we feel that he will take into account the struggles of everyone when he does.

But, it is up to us the living while we have breath to do our very best to make this a better place for all concerned and that does include those who might be different from ourselves.

The Reverend Martin Luther King once said that he thought that the black community and its struggles would end up being the conscious of this nation. If that be true, taking into account what so many blacks face today, this nation’s conscious is really hurting right now.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.