Does White Skin Give You Privilege?

More than a few years ago, I relocated to Baltimore MD and went out looking for a job. I found one in a small factory on the west side of the city. They made pretend fireplaces out of concrete. The plant was filthy; there was concrete dust everywhere, but I was going to be making $2.00/hr. Beside the plant manager, I was the only white face there.

I went to introduce myself to my new co-workers. This is a hard working group of guys, I thought, as I watched them labor. The first guy I introduced myself to grunted and asked how much money I was making.

“Two bucks an hour,” I replied.

“Boys, we got a problem. This white boy is making two dollars an hour.” All I heard was angry laughter. The men gathered themselves together and walked in the direction I was coming from, the manager’s office. They opened the door and entered.

“How could you pay this kid 20 cents more than you are paying us. You cannot do that. He doesn’t have the faintest idea of what we do or how we do it… and you’re paying him more than you’re paying us!”

“OK, I’ll cut his pay. He will make what you are making.”

“WAIT A MINUTE,” I protested as my own self-interest was on the line. My co-workers joined me in protesting.

“You’re not gonna to cut his pay--you are gonna raise ours!” the workers insisted.

The manager disappeared for a few minutes, and returned with the news that every worker would now receive $2.00/hr.

After my first day’s work, my coworkers took me out for all the diet sodas I wanted, “on the house.”

The question is, why did the manager offer me an extra twenty cents an hour? Some of my coworkers had worked there for a year or more without a pay raise. They knew what they were doing. I was off the street. The management saw me as becoming the crew chief or supervisor. They did not think that any of their current employees would be able to do that job. Based on my white skin, they saw that I was “executive talent.” Apparently, white guys cannot judge talent.

The same thing happened to me when I went to work at a plating factory. Plating is filthy, corrosive, poisonous, dangerous, unhealthy, and as unpleasant a work environment can be.

The plant manager warmly received me. He expressed concern about being able to hold on to “talented workers.” He immediately told me I had a future if I stayed. He offered me considerably more an hour than what he was paying the 100% black workforce. He assured me that in no time he would move me into management.

When I was an organizer for the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union, they sent me to be part of a team organizing the workers at a luxury resort in the mountains of Virginia, the Homestead. Opened in the 1800s, it represents the epitome of southern hospitality. Guests are still expected to “dress” for dinner.

The Homestead featured an all black wait staff and annual events, such as, the watermelon carrying races, etc. Since there had not been black people living in the county since the 1960s. The hotel imported Jamaicans every year to pretend to be “ole black Joe.” The wait staff lived on the grounds in an old run-down dormitory with three toilets and three showers for about 150 people.

Poverty is pervasive in this part of the mountains. Imagine houses with roofs caved in, but still inhabited.

It was a very difficult place to organize. More than one organizer had been chased out of town by a local shooting buckshot. Besides the coalmines, the hotel provided most of the employment in the area. People were glad to have any job.

My teenage daughter came to visit me in the middle of the campaign. She joined me on my rounds as I talked to people about the union. As my daughter saw the poor conditions the workers lived in, she said, “These people are certainly going to vote for a union. They have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.”

We lost the election for union representation 5 to 1. Why? In the words of more than one worker, “At least we have it better than the blacks.” And, they were right. They did not have much, but at least they were regarded by the local power structure as being “better than Black.” In an area where white people had very little, that meant a lot.

Our new Attorney General, Eric Holder, called us a nation of “cowards” for not having honest discussions about race in America. He is right. Stories like mine happen far more often than can be imagined. Black people know it; white people do not want to admit it, but white skin privilege exists.

Try renting an apartment. Statistics show that white people on a waiting list get housing before Black people. If you are white, you can go into a jewelry or clothing store worrying about security following you around.

Part of having an honest dialogue is to accept the reality that white people enjoy privilege based on their color and nothing else.

Guess Who is Running for President

1967 – The Civil Rights Movement had been in high gear for 15 years. A movie, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was released. It's plot involves a white family whose progressive politics are shaken up when their young daughter falls in love with an African-American. The makers of the film wanted to confront the racism that exists even among northerners who supported the struggle for integration in the South. In order to do this, they made the African-American impossibly perfect. First, they cast Sidney Poitier. Gorgeous! He graduated with highest honors from very prestigious universities. He was a medical doctor who had already started contributing his energies and skills to helping people in the third world. He refused to have pre-marital sex with his very willing fiancé. He even left a couple of dollars near the parent's phone to repay them for a long distance call he made. Perfect. Yet, the father was opposed to his daughter's relationship. He just could not get over the fact that the "impossibly perfect" boy friend is Black.

Forty-one years later, white people face another test. There is a Black man running for President. He seems to be almost impossibly perfect. He rose from humble beginnings. He is young, athletic, and vital. He and his almost impossibly perfect wife have been married for nineteen years without a hint or scandal. He graduated at the top of his class from very prestigious universities. He taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago for twelve years. He chose to work to empower unemployed steelworkers and their families in tough streets of South Chicago. He devoted his life to public service rather than follow the typical path of someone with his resume and get rich quick.

The USA is in horrible shape. The gap between rich and poor is greater than it has been since the robber barons of the nineteenth century. The rich's greed has led to the housing crises, the crises in health care, the crises in unemployment, the crises in trade, the crises in energy, crises in the life and death issue of war and peace.

The Black man should be leading in the polls by a lot. But he is not.

It can't be because people think his opponent has a better program. Eighty percent of the people in fact, believe the Black man's program is better than the white man's.

The people do not believe the white man stands for change. Especially when this white man touts his 90% support of the incumbents policies.

So why isn't Obama running away with the election? How can it be that McCain might actually win and subject us to more of the same?

Is it that large numbers of white people are like the father in "Guess
Who's Coming to Dinner" and just can't get over the fact that our "impossibly perfect" candidate is Black?

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth

I didn't write this. Tim Wise did. I am reprinting it because It is a most important document on race. I hope you will take the time to read it and let me know your thoughts.



March 18, 2008

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth
Of National Lies and Racial America

By TIM WISE


For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.


Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the
game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.


But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the
unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.


But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it,cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.


Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?


Well actually, no he didn't.


Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around,
indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological
grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.


He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the
act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."


But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled
its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those
who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."


And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or
shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.


Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in
the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.


So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.


What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate
crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new.

To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the
Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.


But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as
white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.


This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not
be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."


And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.


We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science
research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.


Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were
enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.


Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that
postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.


Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on
memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.


Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it
so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best,"
portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks
of Beaver and Larry Mondello.


These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom
Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing
wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.


No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its
implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped,it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.


It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.


So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.


What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares
white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?


And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in very picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.


Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the
white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed,
hell was where you'd be heading.


So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because
they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.


So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.


Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.


Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at:
timjwise@msn.com


This essay originally appeared in Lip.

New Orleans, Katrina and Race

“This place is going to look like Little SOMALIA.” That’s what Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times on September 2^nd... five days after Katrina hit New Orleans. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

At the same time babies died for lack of milk. Older people died from exposure or dehydration. People with illnesses and/or disabilities died from a lack of medicine or treatments. People died from exposure. Families were torn apart with nothing in place to help them find one another. Too few busses arrive to carry people to relative safety.

Lieutenant General Steven Blum told reporters half of the troops had just returned from assignments overseas and are "highly proficient in the use of lethal force." He pledged to "put down" violence "in a quick and efficient manner."

When did New Orleans join the axis of evil? What did the primarily black citizens of New Orleans do to be compared to Somalia? Did we really expect the National Guard attack the survivors of this American tragedy? Don’t we believe the National Guard’s role is to protect and defend not create a military state for the innocent?

Of course, New Orleans needs to be safe and protected from the criminal elements that exist there. But, is this why the rescue mission was so delayed? The numbers of criminals are quite small compare to the throngs of displaced, law-abiding people. They could have done both simultaneously as they are doing now.

The National Guard should have been in New Orleans before the hurricane with amphibious vehicles, MREs, water and medicine. The National Guard should have been evacuating the victims of Katrina before she hit landfall. Federal, state and local officials knew the threat, knew that the levee was vulnerable, that the poor had no way to get out of its path, and knew Katrina was hurricane of their nightmares. Yet they did so little. Why?

Officials continue to receive a lot of criticism for not having a plan. But they did. The poor, elderly and disabled were to either stay and ride it out, or go to the superdome. We watched an interview with the head of emergency services as people flocked into the Superdome before Katrina made landfall. A reporter asked him about the services the people were going to receive. He said he was there to house them… not to feed them. You see, that was the plan. They made that plan despite knowing how fragile the levee was, despite the mock disaster failure.

There were no plans for food, for meeting hygienic needs, for keeping families together or anything else. That is the kind of planning that officials make for poor and other disenfranchised. The displaced know it and it’s why they are angry. You would be too.

When Katrina peeled the roof off the superdome, she exposed the ugly, hypocritical lie of American equality. Who was left? People who are poor, disabled, and of color. They know why it took five days for government to make a footprint at the convention center and other places where people were herded. They know that, in this society, they do not matter.

It’s not often that mainstream America gets to see what happens to people who fall through the safety net. It is ugly and horrifying. The institutional racism, and discrimination exposed by Katrina should make us realize that we have become complacent. We still have much to do to make America what it should be.

What is happening evokes in us some of the same feelings we had in the ‘60s when we saw young black people bitten by dogs, tear-gassed and attacked with fire hoses. The civil rights movement truly took on a national character when we saw what was happening in the south back then. What’s happening in New Orleans today stirs within us the same emotions and disbelief. And again, white people are shocked at the disparity, and have trouble accepting what is happening right here in America.

Let’s not forget these feelings, because the fight against injustice continues. Nationally, it continues as we continue to look for the living and the dead in the gulf coast, it continues as we discuss the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Locally, it continues when city officials fail to meet consent decrees. It continues when bond issues for new school are up for a vote. And, it continues when your neighbors deny a small group of disabled people a home in your neighborhood.

Confederate Supporters

Throughout our history there have been those who have wrapped themselves in the American Constitution to oppose progress. A recent letter writer, Mr. James Shaner, Sr., quoted former Chief Justice Roger Taney to back up the neo-conservative’s “strict constructionist” argument. Briefly, that position says that the founders principles and original intent were clear” and should not be challenged.

Forget for a moment, that the founders included a method for amending the constitution (a process which has happened 27 times in our history). Let’s just look at Justice Taney. He is most famous for writing the majority decision in the Dred Scott case which was decided by a 7 to 2 vote in 1857. This decision overturned all restrictions on attempts to limit the spread of slavery into the territories. How did such a reprehensible decision be reached?

The majority of the Supreme Court felt that the original intent of the framers of the Constitution must be upheld. To that end Taney wrote; The Constitution and histories of that time (the founding of our Country) show, free or slave, Black people were not considered to be citizens. He went on that if “persons of the negro race…were recognized as citizens in any State of the Union”, they would be able to “go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done (with) the inevitable producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.”

Let’s look at the language of the U.S. Constitution in 1857.

Article 1, Section 2 said that;

“Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.”

This language was changed by the 14^th amendment which was passed 11 years after Dred Scott. Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment says “the basis of representation … shall be in proportion … to the number of male citizens 21 years of age.”

Even this language was changed. It took another 70 years before women were included with the passage of the 19^th Amendment. It took several decades more to lower the voting age to 18 with the 26^th Amendment.

Could Justice Taney have thought that the original language of Article 1, Section 2 supported his position?

Article 4, Section 2 of the Constitution originally read that “No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. After his masters death he sued for his freedom. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Using the principles and original intent of the framers of the Constitution, the court ruled that Mr. Scott was not a citizen and was returned to slavery.

If the people who talk about “activist courts” that “stray from the original intent” of the Founding Fathers really want to bring back slavery and take away women’s right to vote to go along with the “original intent” of our founding fathers, they should tell us that. If these people regret the South lost the civil war giving rise to the 13^th and 14^th Amendments, they should speak up or shut up!

Racism at the Springfield Clinic

4/28/2007

Editor:

There are pictures of the Confederate flag, Confederate generals, including one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan on exhibit in Springfield. They are displayed not at an art gallery or museum but in the exam rooms of the main campus of the Springfield Clinic!

I was treated at the Clinic for a splinter. There was a picture of a handsome confederate soldier, bloody but unbowed, proudly holding aloft the Confederate flag. I commented to the doctor that I didn’t think it appropriate for that to be displayed. It was not the first complaint; there were others about a portrait of General Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.

I emailed Springfield Clinic. I did not hear from them for a week. I sent them another email. I received a call several days later telling me my “feedback” had been sent to another level of management. That higher level said my “feedback” had been sent to an even higher level of management. They would be holding a closed meeting to determine what to do.

Chief Operating Officer, Caroline Otten told me after that meeting that the art work would stay on the walls of the examination rooms. “There is Civil War memorabilia all over Springfield”, she said. “We are just blocks away from the Abraham Lincoln Museum”. I agreed that was true and asked if the Clinic was giving the Confederacy equal time. She hung up.

Ms. Otten said the art in question was not in bad taste. The Confederate flag is a symbol of bigotry and racism. We rejoice that the Union won the civil war and put an end to slavery. Even today the flag of the Confederacy represents hatred, violence and death.

If the leadership of Springfield Clinic wants to share these displays they should donate them to a museum or rent an art gallery.

Springfield Clinic should remove these representations of racism immediately.