I think I need to clarify something for my friends out there. Why the Facebook photo...why do I dwell on my 1/16th Cherokee and not the 15/16 Western European?
Fact is I know and embrace the 15/16 Western European. That is mostly my mother's side, God Bless her soul, a person of dignity and love for all.
I remember when we invited one of my 1st grade classmates, a little African American girl, to my birthday party, and some of my friend's parents kept their children home. My mother called each one of them later and read them off for being the bigots they were.
I found out years later of course, but that is what she did. She married my Dad, a 1/8 Cherokee knowing full well his racial history. She did so against the wishes of some in her large family (many supported her though).
How does 1/16th influence me so? It forces me to remember!
I tell you the truth it was hard. At Stanford there was a fellow teammate who was African American and kept beating me out for first string. It was hard. He was better. We competed as equals. I resented it. But never because he was black. I had to live with it. I had to live with the fact that he was a team mate. He is gone now, an early heart attack took him. I often wish I could speak with him one more time.
My mother has taught me better. My father did too.
Yesterday I visited him in the Dementia Assisted Facility. He rambled on about how we were born poor and made due somehow. In spite of the agony of Alzheimers he still, once in a while, makes me proud!
That is why I keep coming back again and again to this. That is why I keep harping on white supremacy.
I hate it! I love my Mom and Dad.
There are many things that conflict in a man's life. There is much to love about our country. There is much to hate.
The one thing that keeps coming back, that lives each day in the hearts of us all, is White Supremacy.
Fox News claims it is gone while all of us know it is not. The United States has done some great things. We stopped fascism and ended the most brutal war in human history. It nicked us, because we had to be brutal too to end it; witness the atomic cloud.
As we opened the death camps and saw the ultimate of man's brutality the world caught its breath, then went back to doing the same brutal things it always had done.
And white supremacy forced us to wait until the late forties before we could allow inter-racial marriage or allow an African American to play major league baseball; wait another almost twenty years before segregation ended and Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed.
Why so long. Why must I remember and just not know? Why do we all ignore the evil that is right next door?
Because white supremacy conditions our every waking moment. It is engrained in our culture to its very core.
The more I study history the more I am appalled. Millions of Native Americans were exterminated, millions of wildlife killed, to steal land and create the "American Dream"..We ruined our environment so we could play a new video game, take a needless ride to the store, get more and more until we are so fat we waddle to the T.V. remote.
Why must the American Dream be at the expense of someone else, always? Why must there be "winners and losers" in our consciousness? Why do we continue to pollute, to watch the doe die in the gutter after getting hit by the truck?
Trump speaks of that a lot. And many of my fellow American listen. Trump embodies the American nightmare.
Hate sells in white supremacy. Love does not.
But, again at the end of the long day, the reckoning is coming. God is not sitting idly by during all of this. The Great Mystery need not act, It needs to just wait.
