Filed Under:  OpEd, Opinion

My wishes for a Black, productive 2017 and beyond

6th February 2017   ·   0 Comments

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

Part II

One of my most important wishes for 2017 is for Black folks to become acutely aware that way too many members of our community are seriously afflicted with a disease that I call white supremacists. These are people whose attitudes and actions basically make them, for all practical purposes, allies of those out to do us harm. This harm can be manifested physically and psychologically.

In the first category are those mostly young Black males in urban areas throughout the United States who kill each other with such reckless abandon. They have accepted the White supremacist’s position that Black lives in this country are worth less than white lives. Most of them are well aware that if they were as quick to kill whites as they are other Black folks, they would be stopped by any means necessary.

A second segment of Blacks who are inflicted with white supremacists are those who express attitudes such as the following:

Thomas Sowell—“Black students with SAT scores of 1,000 should not consider going to any Black college because they will be educationally mismatched.”

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—“If I ever went to work for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or did anything directly connected with Blacks, my career would be irreparably ruined. The monkey would be on my back because people meeting me for the first time would automatically dismiss my thinking as second rate.”

Whoopi Goldberg—“Call me an asshole; call me a blowhard but don’t call me an African American. Please. It divides us as a nation and as a people and it kinda pisses me off. It diminishes everything I’ve accomplished…”

People such as those who put less value on Black lives than white ones, Goldberg, Thomas, Sowell and those who say things like “She’s dark but pretty,” and “He has good hair,” in describing someone with straight hair and all the others who think like them are classic examples of what the disease of white supremacists can do to a person and a group of people. It makes them authentic Oreo cookies, Black on the outside; white on the inside. It is our responsibility to limit the spread of their infection by any means necessary.

A. Peter Bailey, whose latest book is Witnessing Brother Malcolm X, the Master Teacher, can be reached at apeterb@verizon.net.

This article originally published in the February 6, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.

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