From: Jasper
Date: 10/19/03
Time: 1:50:22 AM
Remote Name: 68.73.207.167
Charlie,
Why is history taught in school? You know why. As friend of mine named Charles Purnell said. “You don’t know who you are unless you know where you came from.” How can you succeed in anything unless you know who you are?
I’m going to say some things you already know to put what I have to say next in context:
“OUR” forefathers did not come here from England on the Mayflower to escape religious persecution. SOME of our forefather did. And they brought their slaves with them. And they immediately began persecuting people who didn’t agree with their religious beliefs.
Our first Irish-Americans came here as slaves. That didn’t work out so well for the slave owners because too many of them escaped and blended into other white communities. As long as they changed their names, kept their mouths shut and did not openly practice Catholicism, they were safe. Escaped American and South American Indian slaves didn’t work out because too many of them died. Black Africans were terrific because only the strongest of them survive the Middle Passage and when they escaped they couldn’t go anywhere or do anything to blend in.
Escaped black slaves could be free only if they reached a state or country where slavery didn’t exist. The Fugitive Slave Act changed that. It took a civil war to end slavery and three constitutional amendments to give former American slaves (the men, anyway) the full rights of citizenship. That lasted about 15 years. The Black Codes put an end to that for another seventy years. You and I were born nearly a generation before that happened.
Black people have always gotten special treatment in the United States and government action or inaction for good or ill has always made the crucial difference. I didn’t even mention the mass media where the image of our black forefathers had much to do with how they were treated, or industry where they were the last hired, the lowest paid and the first to be let go. In the best of times black unemployment has always been at least double the rate for whites. These black people know the relationship between work and reward. Some of them have good educations. What kinds of role models are they?
In the late 1970s through the early ‘90s I went to several elementary school, middle school and high school Career Days. With the black kids, I spoke our language and theirs to tell them about auto design and the educational tools they would need to get into the field and succeed. I always scored until some black good-for-nothing, smart-ass kid asked where I was in the progress of MY career compared to white people. When I tried to lie, everyone smelled it. When I told the truth with as much positive spin on it that I could, the expressions on the “smart-asses’ faces said – that’s what I thought!
Later I learned that Ford was using its few black professionals to promote a false image of its hiring and promotion practices. How do you fight the fact that the most negative black kids I talked to were right? The only way I can see to do it is to change the reality. —Jasper