race relations

Thanks for all of your support, public and private. The post below was in response to a dialogue I've been having (with several others) with Miss Fire on her blog. You can check out her posts here and here. It's her blog, so I suppose that she eventually gets to have the last word.

There are just some lines that I don't think that people should cross. And using that word, with that much venom behind it, is a deal breaker for me. I mean, hey, if that's what you feel in your heart, that's on you. And if that's how you think, and you truly try to make amends for it, and work on it, and change your line of thinking, that's great. But I don't see any evidence of that in these conversations. Please point it out to me if you think I missed something.

I just finished reading a book called Founding Brothers, and in it the point was raised that one of the reasons that early American leaders allowed slavery to continue was that they had no idea to do with all of these black people once they were free, because there had never been a truly biracial society before. That thought just blew me away. And I suppose that's why it's so hard - we're doing something that's never been done before. And we didn't exactly start off on the right foot.

I get really frustrated, because just when I feel good about race relations, something always comes along to destroy my hopeful thoughts. A character in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun says that so many of the problems in this world occur because people just don't sit down and talk to each other. I try to live my life as the conduit between worlds, exposing people to a way of life that they may not have understood before. This experience isn't going to dissuade me from doing what I'm doing. It just motivates me to work harder.

Good God, it's almost 4am. I've got to go to bed.