Well, now you know
March 31st, 2008 by 
Gerald Plessner
Posted in Barack Obama, Election 2008, Race & Class, Religion | 
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March 31st, 2008 by Gerald Plessner
Black people are still upset about what our ancestors did to their ancestors 150 years ago. Well, now you know.What’s more, they are still upset about how they were treated after the Civil War, when Jim Crow laws and punishments festered all over the land and thousands of American black men were lynched (hanged from trees, burned alive, tortured and murdered) and two entire generations of African Americans were held in post Civil War economic bondage. Well, now you know.And African Americans are still upset because their good men are treated like criminals even when they are veterans, university-educated professionals or multi-millionaire movie actors who are still stopped by police for DWB (Driving While Black).Well, now you know!
But you think they should just get over it? Should my fellow Jewish Americans just get over what Hitler and his German followers did to our people in the Holocaust?
Should Armenian-Americans just get over what the Turks did to their ancestors a century ago?
Should we just not care about the hatred spewed by religious zealots against our young people who might have a life style those bigots detest but that their God or heredity or evolution made our young people who they are?
Isn’t it time to begin to understand and appreciate the histories, cultures and concerns of all American ethnic groups? This country, like no other in human history, has taken in the persecuted, the hated and the dispossessed from around the world and we did this while limiting the horizons of our own African American underclass. Shouldn’t we be concerned about that after more than 225 years of history?
And finally (I hope) should we be angry about the thinly-veiled hate speech spread across the land by people like Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity or Dennis Prager against African Americans, liberals and others as they attack Barack Obama?
Now that most talk show loud-mouths are again comfortable attacking and ridiculing African-Americans, not even bothering to screen their bigotry, should we be angry because they make big money keeping your uncle Henry angry by spreading fear and hatred?
Think about the words of Barak Obama’s pastor, saying “God damned America” for sins he believes we committed against African Americans. Then pause for a moment and reflect on the words of the white Evangelical Pat Robertson, who said that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were caused by God’s anger at America for abortion and our disrespect for Him. Wasn’t Pat Robertson saying that God damned America?  At lleast he seemed to be spreading the idea that God should do so.
Did the radio talking heads or any respected Republican condemn Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell who said much the same thing? Or is there a double standard when it comes to bigotry too?
Brown vs. Board of Education —- What its death means
July 1st, 2007 by Gerald Plessner
Posted in Clarence Thomas, George Bush, Race & Class, U.S. Supreme Court, Uncategorized | Click here to comment »
I spent 16 years in education never having been in a classroom with a student of color (except for two Korean veterans of the Korean War) so I remember “separate but equal” education.The historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which the U. S. Supreme Court decided that separate but equal was in truth separate and grossly unequal, happened in my young lifetime. I have vivid recollections of life in Midwestern America both before and after America tried to eliminate racial segregation in public schools.My home town of Richmond Heights, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, contained a small African-American enclave in an otherwise all-white city. High school students from that neighborhood got on their own bus each morning to be driven right past our whites-only high school to a blacks-only high school in Webster Groves, the next suburb. (I have no idea where their grade school students got their education.)
America has made great strides since then by providing integrated education, despite the failures of many innovations and the resistance of conservative, racist and frightened opposition. In doing so we have encouraged an open society, enabling all kinds of American youngsters — white, black and otherwise — to learn more, learn about each other, to have better jobs and live better lives.
Now an ultra-conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has advanced a process to disassemble all of that and their first, most blatant attack on our efforts to enable ALL children to get the best education possible has shown them for what they are. Read the rest of this entry »