As I've already admitted I am bearing down on being sixty years old. I lived through many decades of various perceptions about racism in this country and I am telling you the same thing my mother who is 80 has told me many times, I've never seen anything like what America is going through now especially considering that when up to just a few years ago, it seemed like we were so far past the great divisions of previous decades. All I can do is share my perspective and hope that by the time I am done with it, that others may stop and ask, why are we still divided with this kind of hate? Is this normal or are we being played against each other by an evil that many of us are just not capable of understanding?
Maybe it is because I have been for the first time ever in my life called a racist and not just once but so many times that I can't begin to count them since Obama became president. I feel I need to step back and validate that it is exactly because I was taught not to treat people differently due to the color of their skin that I feel no pressure to perceive him or react to him any differently than I would anyone else just because his skin is not the same color as mine. I have no guilt about expressing my opinions about what is going on under his presidency at all and I never will because I have done nothing wrong unless refusing to see past skin color and never letting it be an issue is wrong. I think if I am to share ideas about the causes of so much racial strife and God willing possible solutions then I feel it is important for anyone reading to know from where these ideas originated and the sincerity of my desire to help us heal and grow past those who would stir up hate for their wicked purposes.
In the early to mid fifties, I grew up in middle Tennessee on a cotton farm. I lived there with my mother, grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was the caretaker of the property. We had cows, pigs, chickens, a smoke house, a cellar and a garden around the house and "grand daddy" was in charge of planting and harvesting many acres of fields of cotton every year. We lived in a small farm house and we were poor. But when I was very young I didn't realize that so much because behind our house were several even smaller and more poorly constructed homes where one permanent and several transient black families lived who also helped work the cotton farm.
One day, my grandfather snuck me onto the tractor with him and we went out to the fields. I jumped down and went out to squat next to a line of black workers along one row and picked the cotton with them. It was only after I grew up that I realized the scene I entered was right out of a movie depiction of cotton pickers singing gospels while they worked. The ladies wore turbans on their heads or wide brimmed straw hats to keep the sun off and they tied their aprons up to a corner to have a place to put extra cotton after they had filled a potato sack that had handles sewn onto it. I remember it was scorching hot and hard to get the cotton out of the dark pointed shells without getting pricked. I helped the woman I was next to fill her bag and listened to them sing such beautiful songs in praise of God. Sometimes they would stop singing for a short time and talk across the rows to each other about their kids or grand children but then someone would start up a new song and soon they were all singing together and I sang along with them. My grandfather caught heck for sneaking me off and I don't think I ever got to do it again.
One permanent resident was Ms Ida. She was about my grandmother's age and they were best friends. I have many memories of the two of them sitting on our back porch shelling beans and talking. Although I heard it from others, the N word was never allowed in our Christian home. I was taught from day one that God made us all with the same love and that we were all the same in equality in his eyes. This didn't mean we were all the same, or had the same talents, or same intelligence, or same circumstances of coming into the world, but it meant that we were all his children and loved equally and were to love and respect each other equally and not to look at anyone differently for the sake of the color of their skin alone.
The song I heard and sang in vacation bible school so many times is still a winner as far as I am concerned: "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his site, Jesus loves the little children of the world. Jesus died for the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his site, Jesus died for all the children of the world."
The only time the N word was ever used in our house was one day when I was about four years old, Ms Ida used it. I thought my grandmother was going to have a heart attack. She put down her bowl of beans and looked straight at her and said, "Now Ms Ida, you know we don't use that word around here." And Ms Ida said "Well it is the truth." and she described the man she used it about as a "drunk, lazy, shiftless no good skunk who abandoned his family and stole from everybody." She said, "He is one!" But it didn't matter to my grandmother that the man who Ms Ida described might have fit her, a black woman's, perspective of the definition and she asked her not to use it around her anymore because it was an "ugly word." Ms Ida laughed but I never heard her use it again.
I can remember Ms Ida's grand daughter coming up to play with me on occasions and she always wore the cleanest whitest dresses I'd ever seen. I was a tom boy but when she came over we would play with dolls and other girlie games because I didn't want to be the one to make her get her dress dirty playing things I might have rather played.
The families who lived behind our house had kids and grand kids who would come visit, although like I said, I didn't realize at the time how poor we were, I knew they were poorer than us and my mother and grandmother would take them things. Sometimes it was canned food or clothes and even the toys I had outgrown. I remember the first time I was taken along for such a visit and standing in the doorway of the one room shack, noticing that they had nothing but thin strips of wood stuffed with newspaper and covered with newspaper in some areas, a bed, a dresser, a stove, a sink, a table and a few chairs. I wondered how could they all live in that one little space with so few things to get them through the day. I felt so thankful for all that we had after that and I believe that was probably the moment that I took up the cause of helping black people how ever I could to have better lives. I didn't understand why it seemed like so many people distanced themselves from them or weren't trying to help, but I knew there was some kind of injustice going on to cause it. I couldn't have been more than five years old at the time so what ever I thought about it came from the most simplest and innocent view of wanting to help others which is what I had already been taught was the purpose of our lives and why we were put on this earth.
To be continued...............
I am pinning the news of the day below because I am sure it is what inspires me to write on this topic.
Who printed up all of the signs that were professionally made for these protests? Why is it that there are those who want to cause more hate than love and divide us by skin color? What ever it is, it is not Godly. Lets have the discussions that need to be had, but lets do so while realizing that there are dark forces at work here to drive hate rather than find solutions. We must agree to seek peace together or else those who will profit from our hate will rule the day and take away our freedoms equally.
And one more that for some reason wouldn't pin... Ex-Police Chief Claims He Was Pressured and Then Fired for Not Arresting George Zimmerman: ‘They Just Wanted an Arrest http://www.theblaze.com/s...
