Woke Up Wondering (Where I Am & How To Get Away)

I'm a sucker for a Tea Party photo from Madison, Wis. - wildly over-stating Obama's racial intentions - when that state's terrible civil rights record easily colors why a Tea Partier, specifically, would think that way. I got the photo from this post:

  "How the GOP Became the 'White Man's Party': Dog Whistle Politics - Coded Racial Appeals Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class" 

I often wonder if white bloggers read blacks, beyond The Root, because I rarely find whites linked to them - that includes Instapundit & Co. If they did, they'd find more to discuss than the shallow pursuits they do cover, or even how they talk. They make me think they don't understand, blacks talk amongst ourselves, as well:

"Annually, my grandmother recounts my Uncle James' Christmas Day birth, explaining that because the hospital was understaffed and didn't execute his birth certificate until the next day, his birth date is listed as December 26.

As in past years, someone asked my grandmother why she didn't point out the mistake. Her eyes grew wide, and she shook her head violently. "No! You don't understand," she tells us. "I was at Charity Hospital! Those white doctors didn't talk to us, and we didn't question them."

While my grandmother was in labor, her mother and aunt would wait in a closet-size room reserved for Negroes. Once a black child was born, a nurse would enter the room with her back to its occupants and write on a chalkboard the mother's name, the baby's sex and weight, and whether the baby was dead or alive. With a frown, my grandmother added, "The only thing they ever said to me was, 'Guurl, what you gon' name this baby?'"

That my grandmother would not point out such a mistake is unfathomable to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We only know of her strength. To us she is the lifelong domestic who birthed nine healthy babies, buried two grown sons and slept in the bed her husband had died in hours earlier. But in her eyes, when she tells this story, I can see her vulnerability, her fear that "they'd send me home and not let me come back."

Shannan Hicks, a researcher and storyteller who focuses on the Northern Louisiana post-Jim Crow era, is not surprised that black workers shielded their true feelings from [Phil] Robertson.

"This was the age of black lynchings. A black person would never have reveled their true self to a white person who looked and talked like Robertson," Hicks said before referencing the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem that opens with this stanza:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties."

I'd like to see Ann Althouse apply her writing skills to that poem's meaning today (Curiously, she didn't say much about Phil Robertson's racial comments,...). Does she think about it, in regards to her black friends? Or, Lee Atwater's ghost, haunting the  conservative language used most frequently by her readers:

 

Avoiding black issues by avoiding blacks is a strategy - and tactic - that's easy for whites. (I have many a white friend for whom I was the first black person in their life. I don't know a single black person for whom I can say the same about whites.) I don't think whites comprehend what that means, usually, when they make judgements on things like crime. 

 But what do I know, right? I'm just another black guy, put firmly in his place (We don't want to hear that!) but still carrying on in the country of my birth - which I know very, very well:

"Let’s conduct a little thought experiment. First, for the sake of this thought experiment let’s assume that you have no morals, ethics, or conscience. You are comfortable lying to people, even if they are sick, and even if it will harm their health."

Yep, that much is clear:

"You are comfortable" with it all, I'm not, and slavery's over. 

Slavery's Over. 

And that last link, above, is describing my American Dream,…