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Can the Minds of Whites be Changed? |
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by Rootsie April 30, 2003 It's not enough to say 'let's just wait on the time...' I believe in healing. I do. But Healing is IMPOSSIBLE without truth-telling, as Nelson Mandela said. I don't know, brethrens. I was just telling my students today about the African man who lived 'on display' in the British Museum for years in a replica of an 'African village', but I found something even worse. A man from Congo lived in the monkey house in the Bronx zoo, kidnapped from Leopold's killing fields. He was also 'on exhibit' at the St. Louis World's Fair. Black leaders got him released and tried to help him, but he ended up taking a gun and shooting himself in the heart... His name was Ota Benga. This was in 1906. Really it is a valid question-how do you deal with people like this? They invented a bogus evolutionary biology to back themselves up. Most white people don't 'get' why black people are so 'angry', ("why are you so angry? Get over it.) because it is painful to look at the truth of then AND now. When I talk to other white people about our privilege, about what our skin tone buys us, they are most often stunned. The youths understand, but the adults want to scuffle and deny 'oh it's not that bad this is the land of opportunity it's about social class what about affirmative action and discrimination against whites and...' Well yes class privilege, male privilege, are real as well, but the race issue is real too and must be confronted on the real. I think necessity is everything when it just becomes too ridiculously costly on every level for whites to remain in their complacency and ignorance (at best)...the structures of white supremacy will collapse. The problem is a few white guys have most of 'everything' already. As a person born into America I have taken many different approaches and had many different thoughts over the years ranging from let me be an educator and at least tell the children the truth, to 'I can't wait to get OUT of this country.' My sense of responsibility as one of the 'privileged' in this so-called 'democracy' has kept me here, but I must say this last few months has removed even more scales from my eyes. The fact is this government is no more of me by me or for me than Saddam's was for the Iraqi people, and that is a global condition, and we must be dealing with THAT. I fully appreciate the leisure, comfort, and relative safety my white skin confers on me without me having done a thing to earn it. But the fact that billions suffer just so I can live like this is an abomination. It makes our luxuries into poisons, and makes it impossible to speak with a straight face about 'European culture'. What might THAT be? The beauties and strengths came right up the Liberian peninsula (my ancestral place) and across the Mediterranean from Africa a few hundred years ago. The wickedness seems indigenous. One of the Conquistadors' main proofs for the idea that the 'Indians' in America were not human is that 'they hold everything in common.' This disgusted them. After a few years the Pope declared the Indians human, and brought the millions over from Africa to be their slaves instead. They'd killed off 90% of the Indians by then anyway, through their filthy hygiene and sadistic tortures. You can't put a good face on this. These are the facts. There will be no healing until ones can bear to hear the truth. One Love, and I really mean this and knows what it cost. Love is One. All there is. is One Love. We flow from Love and in Love and to Love all returns. Love is without conditions or qualities or expectation. The way to Love is by way of loving. Much of what is called love by us is not love at all, but fear. The realm of 'emotional love' is useful, because through it, we learn all that love is NOT, and some things about what it IS. The longing, the yearning, is everything, because even though it may not appear so, all longing is longing for the beloved, all yearning is for oneness in HIM. By sharing in relation with one another, we real-eyes the One Love! This does not fail. Sacred love, secular love, spiritual love, sexual love shared in relation is all One. One Love!   Copyright © 2003 rootsie.com |
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