Letters to the Editor
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@Aeschylus, I know this is coming late in the game...
The US government invented HIV to kill blacks? are you shitting me? Oh, but that's understandable because of Tuskegee. But when I white person makes a similarly batshit statement based on the personal experience of some white folks...well, he's just an asshole.
Listen, I have faith in the government, too, Aeschylus, but the U.S. government has a history of medically experimenting on people of color. Did you know that as recently as the 1970s, poor black women, Latinas and Native American women were forcibly sterilized, sometimes without their knowledge, by Public Aid offices? Sometimes children as young as 10? And all of this happened, not to mention the syphilis experiments, throughout Wright’s lifetime.
That’s why it was important in Obama’s speech when he compared Wright to his grandmother. As a black person, I realize that the whole the government gave black people AIDS is kind of a commonly held belief in the black community, but that doesn't mean I agree with such sentiment. I excuse that kind of thinking because I know from where it stems and have heard it repeated to me from people I hold dear. I think there is tendency to excuse such lines of thinking because we feel justified in our anger (Why shouldn't dude think that?), but really it keeps us chained, makes us relive pain. Institutional racism still has us in a chokehold, but at least we aren't getting the firehoses. Obama is asking us to realize that, it may be bad, but it isn’t as bad as it used to be. He’s asking us to cut some slack to those who grew up in and lived in an era that wasn’t as open as we are today.
I find myself torn about agreeing with Obama, that the way to move forward is to recognize that these kind of paranoid thoughts have their origins in a different time--because then I remember all the young black men locked up, the dire situation when it comes to educating black kids, the fact that blacks are still primarily poor. And then I realize that these two realities are not antithetical. And you wanna know why? It's because I am possible--a black kid raised by a single mother in the projects in America (in the 1980s, no less, during the crack epidemic) on food stamps. And like Obama, I really believe that the United States uniquely presents opportunities for people like me that no other country does. It makes me believe in the power of the ideals we hold up for ourselves in this country. And I want to embrace that.