Our local middle school was host to a variety of riots, rapes and violence that the administrators of the school were clearly unable to contain or control.
During the 1980's and 1990's, some 20 or 30 years after I and my family had moved on, my old neighborhood became notorious for hosting crackhouses and for deranged youths firing automatic weapons at each other from across the street.
This drama all unfolded in a small town just outside a major military training base in California. On the other side of this town was a major tourist destination and an oasis for the moderately rich, all of whom were white in those days. Was it right and proper for all of this violence to be taking place? The white boy in me says, "hell no." But the part of me that will always be a little darker than my fellows says, "you have no clue what it feels like to be looked down on your entire life by whites, their black surrogates and a system designed to either kill you in a stupid war or jail you for being outside your house after dark.
Oppression is a word that comes close, but such a word implies a more universal application – the racism and racist intentions of the local police departments, employers and school administrators, triggered by fear more than any other emotion, was directed squarely at the black community. Every time. Without exception.
So a pastor on the south side of Chicago cuts loose a barrage of angry, frustrated rhetoric at a time most likely to be noticed because of the contrast with an increasingly meaningless "joyful" holiday season – so what? There is plenty going on inside our country, our society and our culture that white people should be getting angry and upset about. And true to form, we rely on our black fellows to feel these feelings for us while milk-toasty whites sit back in their comfortably-numb lifestyles completely unaware what many of the policies the Bush Crime Family have implemented mean in real-life, day to day terms.
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