Millions of white Americans have felt disenfranchised since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. And the face of this black man, this nation's first black president, the black man that has made so many whites seethe with anger because they believe that a black man is inherently not American, that a black man and his family should never sully the pristine whiteness of the very seat of white culture, The White House, this black man's heart is heavy with pain and sorrow as he continues to carry the ever increasing weight of the black cross upon his back.
The drumbeat of "take our country back" became the clarion call for white, conservative Republican candidates trying to procure the Republican nomination for president in 2012, including the Mormon, Mitt Romney. And exactly whom were these gladiators of politics trying to wrest their country back from; a foreigner, a communist, a socialist, or worse, a terrorist? Why, no. The country was and is in danger from that duly elected, twice now, black president rumored to be a Muslim and of course not American. The idiocy of those claims do not deserve recounting or even addressing.
So, all of this cloaked and not so cloaked hate speech from politicians including Democrats from across the United States, the Tea Party/Republican conservatives have all done everything in their power to undermine and demean the black man in the White House from cracking unsavory jokes about his wife, a black woman, not to mention the MSM and cable news outlets with their incessant, one-sided coverage of the growing number of murdered, unarmed, black "thugs". Is it any wonder that across the American landscape, today, the collective question from the white media world is - "Why would a young white boy go to a black church to kill black parishioners?" Why indeed?
The denial that racism still exists is tantamount to denying the existence of black people. Oh, least we forget, the liberal white faction of our great white nation are also guilty of not just denying the existence of racism but of also being irritated by the very suggestion that black people have a valid reason to feel and experience discrimination especially since all those good white folks all worked so very hard to ensure civil rights for "the blacks" and feel betrayed and angry because those blacks want even more equality.
"Good" white folks tired of the issues surrounding equality for blacks in the early 1990's. White commentators and their observations about racism have been more valid and are accepted as gospel than the experiences of a black person; besides those black people are just bellyaching, their just "takers and love being on the government tit". You see, white commentators really understand the black experience because they report on black lives, black crime and black failures. And therein lies the evil, not the dilemma of racism but the evil that is the breeding ground for young whites to be angered by the appearance of a young black child in "The Hunger Games" instead of an acceptable young white actress is significant about our culture, to say the least.
It should be no surprise that a young white man could harbor so much hatred in his being that he could want to start a race war and then kills nine innocent black people. The culture in this country has always embraced violence used indiscriminately against blacks. You remember that old song from the past, "Strange Fruit Hanging From the Trees"? Or if you doubt the veracity of this statement then exactly why are our jails over-filled with young black/minority males? Why has open season on the lives of young black males been quietly swept under the veil of practiced blind ignorance by the majority culture? The answer is simple: black lives do not matter to the white majority unless some relative value or tinder is inherent in a specific black life such as fighting in our many wars, or filling our for profit jails, or simply be the scapegoat for a poor economy orchestrated by banks "too big to fail".
We Americans like to consider ourselves to be the most civilized people on the face of the earth. Sadly, we are the most uncivilized country in the universe. We pay marginal lip service to inequality, we refuse to provide decent affordable medical care for all citizens, our public school education system lags greatly, we worship profits for mega corporations while the average worker earns minimum wage and cannot expect to live in a decent and safe home, we constantly villainize a race of people that we enslaved and declare the problems of enslavement ameliorated while continuing to see race before character. Our cities are in decline, schools with peeling paint and without proper tools to educate and we have legions of wealthy, young whites going to Africa and Asia to help the poor in those countries while our poor children, white and black, continue to fall behind with every tick of the clock.
There are few reasons to expect the future for blacks in this country to be much different than today. The Tools on Fox News, and this includes their Uncle Tom Black minister who declared last week's tragedy an act against Christianity instead of what it was - an act of terrorism to kill blacks. When the media still characterizes the murders last week as "alleged" when the perpetrator has stated his intent, well, we have a very long way to go to change the racial climate in this country, a very, very long way to go.