(Akiit.com) I’ve got two words for white America: Thank you.
Thanks for building homes in poor communities through programs such as Habitat for Humanity; for working with HIV/AIDS relief programs in places such as sub-Saharan Africa.
Thanks for mobilizing the Innocence Project, which is freeing wrongly convicted prisoners, many of whom are black.
When I see such noble efforts, when I witness men and women of all races working for a common good, my faith in humanity is restored.
Reminds me of my own childhood, a time when Jim Crow’s calloused grip on our Southern lifestyles and customs could be seen in whites-only community centers, or in the segregated schools that survived well into my youth.
I can’t forget that.
But it also was a time when more than a few white people availed themselves to me as coaches, mentors, teachers, friends – and heroes.
I can’t forget that, either.
Those two seemingly incongruous images bespeak the layered complexity of America’s race relations, which, despite the growing presence of Hispanics and other ethnic groups, still tends to be defined in black and white.
I wrestle mightily with the notion that many white people are growing tired of blacks dredging up our “painful past.” Truth is, black folks get a little miffed when whites, whose triumphs and successes are well chronicled in history books, tell us, “Get over it!” Or “Move on!”
That task is as daunting as it is unrealistic for a people still piecing together its legacy.
I was struck by what Helen Biderman, an 80-year-old Jewish woman, said about Holocaust Remembrance Day. She was 11 when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and forced her family to live in a ghetto. Her family ultimately fled, with members at one point hiding in a chimney.
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