It would be so easy to just write the whole thing down and pull out the right paragraph at the right time. But the fact is, we are all people whose lives are works in progress. If I think for a minute that I’m here to educate you but refuse to learn from you also, I’m so full of myself I ought to be dismissed.

But my experience shows me that very few white people have ever read an African American history book. People just scream, “Revisionist.” How stupid. If we don’t revise what we think today, we died yesterday! Sometimes people just fight about words. If we don’t want to know how blacks see the world, so we can understand, we are racists.

The Duke LaCrosse incident comes to mind. And I would say most black leaders are doinga good job of this, but they are naturaly overshadowed and tainted by the loud outspoken “Men of Permanent Controversy”. I place the Reverend Al Sharpton in this group of controversial “crying wolf” group. Someone like Bill Cosby, I do not.

As you said, individual blacks achieve all the time, and often it is under the careful guidance of fathers, or at least father figures who serve as their mentors. Part of the breakdown within the black community is the part of the breakdown of responsibility of fatherhood. I think some, under tutelage of those who may have experienced true oppression, have developed the same broad view of whites themselves. And then these impressionable young men turn their lives down roads of hopelessness and despair, as they feel that is just the way it is. They accept the victimization instead of using their God given abilities to push forward in a more positive manner.

Racism exists, but I don’t think it’s solely one way. And until this recent explanation in which you helped me understand, I wasn’t sure how to view your opinion. I almost, mistakenly I now see, painted you as one who has given themselves to the cause of perpetuation of racism by your broad stroke of labeling whites as racist. Luckily , I stuck around long enough to clear that out of my head!

Individual blacks achieve all the time. But when a black professor walks across a the campus of the university in which he will teach and hears the N-word from a dorm window, something is wrong. When black teenagers are followed and watched as they shop, something is wrong. When black men hear car doors lock as they walk by white people’s cars, something is wrong. That something is called racism. Institutional racism is alive and well.

And if white people aren’t actively fighting it, we are racists. “All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

Blacks make 75 cents for every dollar white men make. There are a disproportionate number of blacks in prison. Blacks are almost always the victims of police brutality. The list goes on and on.

I have a feeling we could go back and forth on this all day long, but often times it takes the most blunt and literal explanation to get through my thick skull (I dropped myself a lot as a baby).

I have spent my entire life accepting of all races and ethnicities, often times seeking them out when I saw them, despite the obvious risk of looking like a total social moron. While conservative, I was raised by two very free thinking democrats (aka hippies), who chose not to see the color so much as the person.

I tend to look at the person, and while sometimes I may judge them as a credit or disgrace to their race (be they white, black, yellow, brown, purple with green polka dots, it doesnt matter), I tend to make the argument that they are grouped according to the basis for a good society over that of race.

A white person who uses derogatory terms towards those who are different, I get the term racist. I would say the same in conjunction with a person of any race having such feelings, be they blacks who hate whites, or blacks who hate hispanics, or hispanics who hate Indians (the dot or the feather).

I also take issue with one’s character when they excoriate someone for their hateful demeanor in relation to race within the same breath by which they demean another person’s race for the exact same ignorant reasons.

I deplore a gangbanger who is black, who chooses power in the street but victimization when confronted with the hand of the law when he has very obviously committed a crime. I deplore whites who pretend to be gangbangers of the same nature, and glorify the worst attributes of societal dysfunction. (on a personal note- I was this white person for years)
I will make no judgement of their intelligence on this issue, but will take into question their own personal decision making applications, not based, as I said, on their race, but by the individual.

I am not perfect, but I don’t think that I, the descendant of Europeans who came over far after slavery ended and merely chose to work the land or factory job to make their way toward the American Dream, would qualify as a racist.

As I said, I’m a bit dense here, so maybe I’m missing your piece of the puzzle…