Black & White
Monday started like any other.
The only difference was that I wore one of my favorite tee-shirts.
One that I normally only wear in the house.
In fact, as I made my way through the day, I honestly forgot that I had the shirt on.
From my neighborhood coffee stop to the drug store to the Post Office to the dry cleaner to the barber shop to the supermarket - my path was riddled with looks, both approving and disapproving.
I found the reactions mostly curious until one woman approached me and said, "I think the President went too far with his remarks about Trayvon Martin."
My first thought was to ask this older White woman what she knew about being Black in America, but that would only encourage a conversation that I was neither in the mood or had the energy for.
True, in his recent remarks about the Martin/Zimmerman case, President Obama shared some little known Black History Facts.
Little known to people who are not Black...
A story from NPR, Polls Show Wide Racial Gap on Trayvon Martin Case highlights the simple fact that Black and White people in America just see things differently.
posted by Mister Roberts at
12:22 AM
1 Comments:
Another great post, as usual…and as always, hitting the nail on the head.
The lady you encountered on the street was as wrong as she can be.
President Obama’s comments clearly addressed the elephant in the room. I suspect there were many, many white people who, as they listened to his comments, remembered a time when they clutched their purse, locked their car doors or moved to another seat when an African American man (or women) came near….and deep down, they were shamed. And most people address shame by blaming someone else….in that lady’s case, she wouldn’t feel shame if Obama had not made the comments….and therefore he should never have made them. Head-in-the-sand silly, but probably truer than most of us would like to admit.
I will never know what it’s like to be a black man…..nor will a black man ever know what it is to be a white man. …and that’s not right or wrong….as you note. But I do know how to be a compassionate and fair person. I don’t always succeed in embodying those traits, but I try daily. To paraphrase Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner….what we are dealing with here is a pigmentation issue. Let’s not make it anything more than that.
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