Page 1 of 1 pages
Race. Black. White. Asian.
Who cares? We are a nation of mongrels. Race is not even well defined.
Funny how we went from King’s dream of being race insensitive to the new “dream” of some now: to attempt to force outcomes based solely on “race”.
This will never succeed. You want successful black folks? Easy! Parent them well. You want blacks to be jailed in disproportionate number? No worries - poor parenting can accomplish that.
The only worthwhile social programs are based on class, not race. Those who are in need and can be helped, should be. Those who refuse help cannot be helped.
Race is just so totally irrelevant to anything.
Posted by hoHum on Feb 2, 2005 at 9:57 AM
while I DO agree that what this Killen guy did was terrible and wrong I think that attacking the GOP is a bit didingenous. Did not Bush just elevate a black women to sec of state? Colin Powell?? I think perhaps the book should be “What’s the Matter with Massachussetts” I am starting to feel that maybe the democratic party is trying to keep racism “afloat” to further their welfare state agenda. I think it is an insult to black people to do so.
Posted by reddog on Feb 2, 2005 at 9:59 AM
Get beyond the smoke and mirrors. Who are the heroes and villains really, and who is just clueless? Visit:
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com
Posted by Stephen Marsh on Feb 2, 2005 at 10:53 AM
Anyone here of Bob Byrd? You know, the voice of the Senate? An elder statesmen? Oh yeah, a former Klansman and also a Democrat!!!
Posted by Common Sense on Feb 2, 2005 at 1:17 PM
yeah CS you are right about that. I heard thet there was another person in the congress who was ex-KKK also but I can’t remeber his name.
Oh well people can and do change. I made mistakes in my past. well nothing as drastic as being in the Klan or anything even close but I guess I have some regrets.. who doesn’t.
Watching byrd is interesting tho - the way he talks, his mannerism - he seems like he should be wearing a col sanders outfit.
Posted by reddog on Feb 2, 2005 at 1:56 PM
Contrary to popular rhetoric, race does matter in America. I have had lengthy conversations with black folks in rural southern communities. Although segregation was illegal by the sixties, they unanimously experienced segregation well into the ‘70’s.
Here’s some statistics, unemployment in black communities is twice the national average. At the last year reported (2003), blacks represented 42% of the death row population and 33% of the executions, 42% of arrests,54% of convictions and 59% of incarcerations. Black males from 15 to 24 years old are NINETEEN times more likely to be a homicide victim. Blacks in general are FIVE times more likely to be victims of homicides. Incarceration rates per capita are FIVE times higher than whites. Projections based on history indicate 1 in 3 black males born this year will be involved in the criminal justice system.
AND YOU SAY RACE DOESN’T MATTER!!!
Posted by ChrisB on Feb 2, 2005 at 3:48 PM
I too have talked to and worked with black folks in the rurual south . it is shocking to drive along the back roads of georgia and alabama and see the way these folks live. It’s a whole different mentality down in dixie. They may have lost the civil war but I think that the spirit of slavery still lives on in some white folks- not all white folks but some. while working on a construction site in south alabama the white guys all got tweaked beacause this damn yankee (Me) had the sheer balls to sit and have lunch with the black guys.
having said that I don’t believe (all) the statistics are the fault of racism. I think that jesse jackson and sharpton have fostered racism- almost made a sort of cottage industry out of it.
I cannot put the blame entirely on the white folks and cannot of course blame all black folks either. The answer lies somewhere in the middle and minds much better than mine have been struggling for answers for years. The above phrase about economics is agood one. Keep the poor whites fighting the poor blacks for scraps and divide and conquer.
Posted by reddog on Feb 2, 2005 at 5:52 PM
What can government do to regulate a personal choice, no matter how inheritable, ugly and wrong it is? They cannot. It is a disservice to look beyond individual choices for the answer - especially in government.
Moreover, there is a human element that is being missed - people who are outcast generally disdain litigous resolutions to psychological problems. It proves to them that there is no human to human communication, which is the underlying goal of their hearts and minds.
While people can change psychologically, I think the best approach is to rebuke racism when you see it - join in with someone who is fighting it, make a real scene about how someone is attacking a member of your (human)family and doing great psychological harm. The human being underneath is the certain conduit to facillitate the communication required to change, instill, and forget.
Then we grow together faster and more heartily.
Posted by S H on Feb 2, 2005 at 8:54 PM
There are some things that government can do to help erode racism. Elected officials can rhetorically and legally marginalize organizations that preach the racist line. School funding can be reformed so that poor localities aren’t stuck with insufficient resources (race is not the single identifier in those neighborhoods, but there’s a correlation). Different treatment of citizens on the basis of race by cops and courts can be publicized and punished. Law and order in non-white, high-crime neighborhoods can be enhanced, especially stemming the free flow of guns. Racist literature and propaganda literally criticizes itself with all of its blather and foolishness; if a governor or the president were to read aloud on TV a tract from, say, White Aryan Resistance, noting the points of their arguments and shooting them down with logic and straight-up assault on their messages, it would make it clear to young people and old that racism is to be equated with moral blindness and shame. They need to be relentless about it; when they are, lots of minds change; just see the effects when they propagandize in favor of a war. If the same energy that was used to vilify cigarette smoking was applied to racism, race-haters would eventually be as stigmatized as smokers are now. Which is odd, now that I say it, because smoking isn’t a moral issue but a health issue, while the willingness to hate or limit the potential of someone based on their appearance is clearly immoral. Elected officials have the appetite to be leaders or they wouldn’t work so hard to convince us to vote for them; let them truly lead, then. Some folks will cling to their tired old hatreds, but at the risk of seeming flippant, eventually they’ll die. Let’s see some effort to create an anti-racist climate in the broad culture and let the upcoming youths partake of that.
Posted by Kuya on Feb 2, 2005 at 11:31 PM
Mr. Muwakkil:
I feel the frustration you express in this piece. That “The masses of African Americans are faring badly.” is a gross understatement. The burden of racism is slowly killing us, mentally, physically and spiritually. The distain and contempt the masses of Black people harbor for America (and the West in general) for its refusal to ackowledge and own up to the reality that it could not have attained its status as the most powerful nation on earth if not for the brutal inhumane rape and pillage of Africa and Africans the world over and certainly cannot maintain that status if it discontinued that practice is manifested in an almost suicidal ritual of self destruction. That America’s slide is greased by “the continuing waste of human resources that we blithely countenance” is a bitter painful irony Black folks see and feel but white America refuses to wake up to.
Posted by theloneous on Feb 3, 2005 at 8:50 AM
Reading the column, I felt good that there are some commentators out there who bring the noise, or as Malcolm X would say - make it plain. But then I read some of the comments and I remembered I was in America. The comments are precisely why black Americans need to forget about some rainbow coalition and unify on their own. As Amiri Baraka would say - “Black is a Nation.” It might sound divisive but blacks have tried to make it work for a long time; it is the whites who simply cannot let go of white supremacy and privilege and what has been gained by those ideals.
IT.
Posted by Isome Truman on Feb 3, 2005 at 5:11 PM
I still believe that economics and poverty is the root of the race problem. That is not to say that the Arayan brotherhood or the nation of Islam are not voices of racism and hate.
I am white and cannot look thru the eyes of a black man to see what racism is truly. i do know that sometimes I am almost embarrassed by some well meaning do good whites who probably want to help the situation but cause more animosity than it’s worth. i do know if I was black and somebody came along and gave me the idea that the only way I could get ahead is by their benovolence and charity i think I would be offended by the idea that I could not get ahead on my own merits.ability and intelligence. No disrespect meant or intended.
Posted by reddog on Feb 3, 2005 at 6:09 PM
At some point we need to look back into our history in America when and right after slavery. Back then we were united and didn’t depend on another race. Black people empowered themselves and white folks began to deal with us with respect. Leaders fighting for intergration lead black unity to destruction. Black were educated to own business back then, now we’re educated to work back on the plantation. Blacks whom become well-off via the black public take their money and give it right to white folks, million dollars home etc. Why not create business in black neighbors or invest in schools. What other race do you know off that always crying racism. Black so call leader are carrying this race thing around as oppose to education and empowerment.
Peace
Posted by Phil on Feb 4, 2005 at 10:28 AM
It was also extremely conspicuous how the republican party used the “anti gay” ordeal or what in their twisted heads are “moral values”.. to maintain that southern vote.
Posted by Mike on Feb 4, 2005 at 7:15 PM
Racism is all about class in american society. The Idea that there are more than one race other than just the human race is put forward to state persons who skin color is not “white” are inferior. These ideas oof superiority and inferioriy are very muuch embetted in our american culture for a very long time. This studipity has easised over time ,but still is present in the mines of many and lays in the mminds of all members of the human family.
Posted by gary harding on Feb 7, 2005 at 7:00 AM
There is only one species of human being: Homo sapien, but there are several sub-species, better known as races. Hatred of ‘the other’ may be as old as the genus Homo. It’s trivial to simply call it a matter of class, racism, like all forms of xenophobia is far older and more intractable than class distinctions. Workers have never been slaves the way African American’s were and it’s ignorant to think so.
Posted by larry jones on Feb 7, 2005 at 7:48 AM
There’s good evidence for the idea that primate xenophobia has a survival function, or at least once had. Caring for “one’s own” and driving away strangers clearly helps procreate “my” tribe. But now that we have a world of more than 6 billion, with complex immigration patterns, masses of deadly weapons, and shared reliance upon vital resources that are known to have limits, it makes much more sense to cultivate ways of thinking that help us feel linked to one another and reliant upon each other’s talents and work, rather than fighting it out for a piece of the survival pie. Plus, warring uses up so many human and material resources, it’s more often a case of diminishing returns as the result of war in anything but the shortest term. Groups like W.A.R. or any other that promote a false Darwinian model are out of touch with current reality, and so are other less extreme ideologies that fail to recognize modern shared reliance of people at large, regardless of racial background. One minor ray of hope I’ll cite, at the risk of appearing naive (which I strive not to be), is that racial hatred and the idea of racially “pure” babies (i.e. denouncing racially “mixed” marriages) is getting more severe questioning and is being abandoned as a way of thinking more often than at any time in history. Not to suggest that the process is finished by any means nor that many aren’t quite stubborn in their attachment to xenophobic attitudes, but at least they’re less taken for granted as being well-founded than they used to be. Changing deep-seated attitudes is no short-term project, takes a lot of effort even when the effort feels useless at times.
Posted by Kuya on Feb 7, 2005 at 4:20 PM
As usual, Muwakkil offers a lucid understanding of racial issues in a climate of denial. Denial or repression “serves to strengthen Americans’ reluctance to confront our racist present.”
Out of repression develops symptoms in the forms of words and gestures, parapraxis or a “slip of the tongue” that allows us to see public expressions as a sign that always conceals itself. If anyone doubts Muwakkil’s analysis, read the following comments:
“Race. Black. White. Asian.
Who cares? We are a nation of mongrels. Race is not even well defined.”
In this case, even denial inadvertently brings anti-black racism to the surface. That’s what is so disturbing and pathological about white supremacy. Out of a hybrid culture, a binary world-view of a collective white racial identity was formed that made blackness the symbol of everything that was evil, ugly, and inferior. Blacks are still perceived as people who do not have the basic right to be human, but who are barbaric, lazy, unintelligent people waiting for hand-outs. This brings us to the next comment:
“I am starting to feel that maybe the Democratic Party is trying to keep racism “afloat” to further their welfare state agenda.”
Even though white women represented the largest percentage of women on welfare, black women, specifically, and the black race in general, are still made to be synonymous with “welfare” – and in this case with the entire democratic party agenda. Even though the language of race is not written into any laws that guarantee people public assistance, it is always interpreted that way. The democratic party does not need to keep racism “afloat” because racism is still deeply embedded in our society, as indicated by the comment above.
Posted by No name on Feb 7, 2005 at 4:35 PM
An offset to the hopeful note I included in the above post would be my experiences living in Asia. In general, it’s an intriguing and wonderfully intense place to travel in, and when you live there it truly changes the maps in your head. But one thing I have found dismaying in quite a number of Asian cultures is the overt distaste for darker complexions and the preference for lighter ones. I suppose it’s no different from what you could find in plenty of Americans past and present, but having been a boy in the 1960s when there began at least some sort of rhetorical shift against mainstream anti-dark attitudes, I found it very jarring to hear clear statements from local folk against the idea of dark skin being appealing to the eye. In Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and all the other places I travelled, I heard this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not holding the US up as some sort of perfect model, but it was still quite disheartening to hear such things said so straight out. We could do a whole analysis about pale-skinned people who lie in the sun and dark-skinned people who buy skin whitening cream, but again, it was the boldness and widespread expression of the sentiment that set me back. One of those unpleasant reality-checks in the midst of an otherwise fine experience, I would still advocate living (not just vacationing) abroad for a substantial spell to every American who can manage it.
Posted by Kuya on Feb 7, 2005 at 11:13 PM
If blacks like Mr. Salim Muwakkil want to get rid of the “taint” of “race,” why do they condemn white people of mixed ancestry such as the late Anatole Broyard, accusing them of “passing for white,” etc.? They should aspire to make black ancestry a normal part of white American identity - the same as American Indian ancestry. By accusing people of “passing for white,” they are supporting the doctrines that proclaim then to be genetically “tainted.”
Posted by A.D. Powell on Feb 9, 2005 at 8:41 AM
Page 1 of 1 pages
SAVE 53% OFFTHE NEWSSTAND PRICE!
Reader Comments
Race. Black. White. Asian.
Who cares? We are a nation of mongrels. Race is not even well defined.
Funny how we went from King’s dream of being race insensitive to the new “dream” of some now: to attempt to force outcomes based solely on “race”.
This will never succeed. You want successful black folks? Easy! Parent them well. You want blacks to be jailed in disproportionate number? No worries - poor parenting can accomplish that.
The only worthwhile social programs are based on class, not race. Those who are in need and can be helped, should be. Those who refuse help cannot be helped.
Race is just so totally irrelevant to anything.
while I DO agree that what this Killen guy did was terrible and wrong I think that attacking the GOP is a bit didingenous. Did not Bush just elevate a black women to sec of state? Colin Powell?? I think perhaps the book should be “What’s the Matter with Massachussetts” I am starting to feel that maybe the democratic party is trying to keep racism “afloat” to further their welfare state agenda. I think it is an insult to black people to do so.
Get beyond the smoke and mirrors. Who are the heroes and villains really, and who is just clueless? Visit:
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com
Anyone here of Bob Byrd? You know, the voice of the Senate? An elder statesmen? Oh yeah, a former Klansman and also a Democrat!!!
yeah CS you are right about that. I heard thet there was another person in the congress who was ex-KKK also but I can’t remeber his name.
Oh well people can and do change. I made mistakes in my past. well nothing as drastic as being in the Klan or anything even close but I guess I have some regrets.. who doesn’t.
Watching byrd is interesting tho - the way he talks, his mannerism - he seems like he should be wearing a col sanders outfit.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, race does matter in America. I have had lengthy conversations with black folks in rural southern communities. Although segregation was illegal by the sixties, they unanimously experienced segregation well into the ‘70’s.
Here’s some statistics, unemployment in black communities is twice the national average. At the last year reported (2003), blacks represented 42% of the death row population and 33% of the executions, 42% of arrests,54% of convictions and 59% of incarcerations. Black males from 15 to 24 years old are NINETEEN times more likely to be a homicide victim. Blacks in general are FIVE times more likely to be victims of homicides. Incarceration rates per capita are FIVE times higher than whites. Projections based on history indicate 1 in 3 black males born this year will be involved in the criminal justice system.
AND YOU SAY RACE DOESN’T MATTER!!!
I too have talked to and worked with black folks in the rurual south . it is shocking to drive along the back roads of georgia and alabama and see the way these folks live. It’s a whole different mentality down in dixie. They may have lost the civil war but I think that the spirit of slavery still lives on in some white folks- not all white folks but some. while working on a construction site in south alabama the white guys all got tweaked beacause this damn yankee (Me) had the sheer balls to sit and have lunch with the black guys.
having said that I don’t believe (all) the statistics are the fault of racism. I think that jesse jackson and sharpton have fostered racism- almost made a sort of cottage industry out of it.
I cannot put the blame entirely on the white folks and cannot of course blame all black folks either. The answer lies somewhere in the middle and minds much better than mine have been struggling for answers for years. The above phrase about economics is agood one. Keep the poor whites fighting the poor blacks for scraps and divide and conquer.
What can government do to regulate a personal choice, no matter how inheritable, ugly and wrong it is? They cannot. It is a disservice to look beyond individual choices for the answer - especially in government.
Moreover, there is a human element that is being missed - people who are outcast generally disdain litigous resolutions to psychological problems. It proves to them that there is no human to human communication, which is the underlying goal of their hearts and minds.
While people can change psychologically, I think the best approach is to rebuke racism when you see it - join in with someone who is fighting it, make a real scene about how someone is attacking a member of your (human)family and doing great psychological harm. The human being underneath is the certain conduit to facillitate the communication required to change, instill, and forget.
Then we grow together faster and more heartily.
There are some things that government can do to help erode racism. Elected officials can rhetorically and legally marginalize organizations that preach the racist line. School funding can be reformed so that poor localities aren’t stuck with insufficient resources (race is not the single identifier in those neighborhoods, but there’s a correlation). Different treatment of citizens on the basis of race by cops and courts can be publicized and punished. Law and order in non-white, high-crime neighborhoods can be enhanced, especially stemming the free flow of guns. Racist literature and propaganda literally criticizes itself with all of its blather and foolishness; if a governor or the president were to read aloud on TV a tract from, say, White Aryan Resistance, noting the points of their arguments and shooting them down with logic and straight-up assault on their messages, it would make it clear to young people and old that racism is to be equated with moral blindness and shame. They need to be relentless about it; when they are, lots of minds change; just see the effects when they propagandize in favor of a war. If the same energy that was used to vilify cigarette smoking was applied to racism, race-haters would eventually be as stigmatized as smokers are now. Which is odd, now that I say it, because smoking isn’t a moral issue but a health issue, while the willingness to hate or limit the potential of someone based on their appearance is clearly immoral. Elected officials have the appetite to be leaders or they wouldn’t work so hard to convince us to vote for them; let them truly lead, then. Some folks will cling to their tired old hatreds, but at the risk of seeming flippant, eventually they’ll die. Let’s see some effort to create an anti-racist climate in the broad culture and let the upcoming youths partake of that.
Mr. Muwakkil:
I feel the frustration you express in this piece. That “The masses of African Americans are faring badly.” is a gross understatement. The burden of racism is slowly killing us, mentally, physically and spiritually. The distain and contempt the masses of Black people harbor for America (and the West in general) for its refusal to ackowledge and own up to the reality that it could not have attained its status as the most powerful nation on earth if not for the brutal inhumane rape and pillage of Africa and Africans the world over and certainly cannot maintain that status if it discontinued that practice is manifested in an almost suicidal ritual of self destruction. That America’s slide is greased by “the continuing waste of human resources that we blithely countenance” is a bitter painful irony Black folks see and feel but white America refuses to wake up to.
Reading the column, I felt good that there are some commentators out there who bring the noise, or as Malcolm X would say - make it plain. But then I read some of the comments and I remembered I was in America. The comments are precisely why black Americans need to forget about some rainbow coalition and unify on their own. As Amiri Baraka would say - “Black is a Nation.” It might sound divisive but blacks have tried to make it work for a long time; it is the whites who simply cannot let go of white supremacy and privilege and what has been gained by those ideals.
IT.
I still believe that economics and poverty is the root of the race problem. That is not to say that the Arayan brotherhood or the nation of Islam are not voices of racism and hate.
I am white and cannot look thru the eyes of a black man to see what racism is truly. i do know that sometimes I am almost embarrassed by some well meaning do good whites who probably want to help the situation but cause more animosity than it’s worth. i do know if I was black and somebody came along and gave me the idea that the only way I could get ahead is by their benovolence and charity i think I would be offended by the idea that I could not get ahead on my own merits.ability and intelligence. No disrespect meant or intended.
At some point we need to look back into our history in America when and right after slavery. Back then we were united and didn’t depend on another race. Black people empowered themselves and white folks began to deal with us with respect. Leaders fighting for intergration lead black unity to destruction. Black were educated to own business back then, now we’re educated to work back on the plantation. Blacks whom become well-off via the black public take their money and give it right to white folks, million dollars home etc. Why not create business in black neighbors or invest in schools. What other race do you know off that always crying racism. Black so call leader are carrying this race thing around as oppose to education and empowerment.
Peace
It was also extremely conspicuous how the republican party used the “anti gay” ordeal or what in their twisted heads are “moral values”.. to maintain that southern vote.
Racism is all about class in american society. The Idea that there are more than one race other than just the human race is put forward to state persons who skin color is not “white” are inferior. These ideas oof superiority and inferioriy are very muuch embetted in our american culture for a very long time. This studipity has easised over time ,but still is present in the mines of many and lays in the mminds of all members of the human family.
There is only one species of human being: Homo sapien, but there are several sub-species, better known as races. Hatred of ‘the other’ may be as old as the genus Homo. It’s trivial to simply call it a matter of class, racism, like all forms of xenophobia is far older and more intractable than class distinctions. Workers have never been slaves the way African American’s were and it’s ignorant to think so.
There’s good evidence for the idea that primate xenophobia has a survival function, or at least once had. Caring for “one’s own” and driving away strangers clearly helps procreate “my” tribe. But now that we have a world of more than 6 billion, with complex immigration patterns, masses of deadly weapons, and shared reliance upon vital resources that are known to have limits, it makes much more sense to cultivate ways of thinking that help us feel linked to one another and reliant upon each other’s talents and work, rather than fighting it out for a piece of the survival pie. Plus, warring uses up so many human and material resources, it’s more often a case of diminishing returns as the result of war in anything but the shortest term. Groups like W.A.R. or any other that promote a false Darwinian model are out of touch with current reality, and so are other less extreme ideologies that fail to recognize modern shared reliance of people at large, regardless of racial background. One minor ray of hope I’ll cite, at the risk of appearing naive (which I strive not to be), is that racial hatred and the idea of racially “pure” babies (i.e. denouncing racially “mixed” marriages) is getting more severe questioning and is being abandoned as a way of thinking more often than at any time in history. Not to suggest that the process is finished by any means nor that many aren’t quite stubborn in their attachment to xenophobic attitudes, but at least they’re less taken for granted as being well-founded than they used to be. Changing deep-seated attitudes is no short-term project, takes a lot of effort even when the effort feels useless at times.
As usual, Muwakkil offers a lucid understanding of racial issues in a climate of denial. Denial or repression “serves to strengthen Americans’ reluctance to confront our racist present.”
Out of repression develops symptoms in the forms of words and gestures, parapraxis or a “slip of the tongue” that allows us to see public expressions as a sign that always conceals itself. If anyone doubts Muwakkil’s analysis, read the following comments:
“Race. Black. White. Asian.
Who cares? We are a nation of mongrels. Race is not even well defined.”
In this case, even denial inadvertently brings anti-black racism to the surface. That’s what is so disturbing and pathological about white supremacy. Out of a hybrid culture, a binary world-view of a collective white racial identity was formed that made blackness the symbol of everything that was evil, ugly, and inferior. Blacks are still perceived as people who do not have the basic right to be human, but who are barbaric, lazy, unintelligent people waiting for hand-outs. This brings us to the next comment:
“I am starting to feel that maybe the Democratic Party is trying to keep racism “afloat” to further their welfare state agenda.”
Even though white women represented the largest percentage of women on welfare, black women, specifically, and the black race in general, are still made to be synonymous with “welfare” – and in this case with the entire democratic party agenda. Even though the language of race is not written into any laws that guarantee people public assistance, it is always interpreted that way. The democratic party does not need to keep racism “afloat” because racism is still deeply embedded in our society, as indicated by the comment above.
An offset to the hopeful note I included in the above post would be my experiences living in Asia. In general, it’s an intriguing and wonderfully intense place to travel in, and when you live there it truly changes the maps in your head. But one thing I have found dismaying in quite a number of Asian cultures is the overt distaste for darker complexions and the preference for lighter ones. I suppose it’s no different from what you could find in plenty of Americans past and present, but having been a boy in the 1960s when there began at least some sort of rhetorical shift against mainstream anti-dark attitudes, I found it very jarring to hear clear statements from local folk against the idea of dark skin being appealing to the eye. In Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and all the other places I travelled, I heard this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not holding the US up as some sort of perfect model, but it was still quite disheartening to hear such things said so straight out. We could do a whole analysis about pale-skinned people who lie in the sun and dark-skinned people who buy skin whitening cream, but again, it was the boldness and widespread expression of the sentiment that set me back. One of those unpleasant reality-checks in the midst of an otherwise fine experience, I would still advocate living (not just vacationing) abroad for a substantial spell to every American who can manage it.
If blacks like Mr. Salim Muwakkil want to get rid of the “taint” of “race,” why do they condemn white people of mixed ancestry such as the late Anatole Broyard, accusing them of “passing for white,” etc.? They should aspire to make black ancestry a normal part of white American identity - the same as American Indian ancestry. By accusing people of “passing for white,” they are supporting the doctrines that proclaim then to be genetically “tainted.”
register a new account »Posting Security