It’s been a sobering week in the news. During our church service today our old pastor read St. Francis of Assisi’s famous prayer.
Like many others I watched the Facebook video of the aftermath of four bullets pumped into a St. Paul man because of a frightened Minnesota policeman. I feel as helpless as the little girl in the back seat of that car trying to comfort her Mother. And yet this was not Memphis in 1968. This was not Detroit in 67. It wasn’t even Rodney King. Not even close. Not even in Dallas. Racial progress might be as Malcolm X described it: the slow pulling of a knife out of the back of black America, but it is coming out.
Yesterday I got a call back from the folks putting a teaser together in hopes of getting some interest in Hollywood to produce the screenplay about the infamous 1920 lynching in Duluth. One of its heroes is going to be a cop just as it was in fact. In my audition I read for the part of a cook behind a cafe counter. I’ll go back for another follow up audition. If the movie is ever made I won’t be in it. The teaser will be filmed but anyone producing the film will want real actors if the screenplay is actually optioned. Call this my small answer to bringing about racial concord. I’m not a fan of rose tinted glasses.
Lots of tongues have been clicking since recent events. My Buddy sent me a blog post suggesting that Obama failed to heal America’s racial divide. I think his Presidency has actually vastly improved race relations. For one thing large numbers of black Americans are feeling like they are seeing some success in the economy. Many of them don’t give Obama credit for this but he is seen as having been a “credit to the race” to use an old fashioned turn of phrase. I was actually more annoyed with the many comments snearing at Obama that followed this post. Enough so that I sent in my own comment:
A friend sent me this Althouse Post. Its nitpicking of an NY Times writer for failing to knock Obama for bringing racial healing to America thus leaving it to an incompetent Trump and HC to do what he failed to to annoys me because it puts all the blame on Obama for the failure. He should have walked on water because his critics, like Herod in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, all sneered that he was the new Messiah. Well, If the old Messiah, son of God, couldn’t make us play nicely, it seems unfair to demand that the black son of a white Kansas mother put an end to a 300-year history of race problems without any help from the other side of the political aisle.
That other side?
At his first address to Congress he was interrupted with a cry of “liar.” The Senate’s GOP leader said his party’s first job would be to unseat Obama in 2008 after a honeymoon that ended with Obama’s taking the oath of office. To that end the blue states all enacted identification requirements assuring that poor and minority voters would have a harder time casting future ballots. But racial disharmony is all the President’s fault.
My Mother always told me it takes two to have a fight. The readers of this blog remind me of the circle of kids you always find at a fight in a playground and they are pretty much on the same side. They are big on catcalls but not so big on reflection. Althouse, What are you doing to help fix America’s sorry racial history besides tossing out chum?
I sort of thought about going to a worship service at Duluth’s St. Mark’s AME church this afternoon to pray for the fallen. Instead I wrote this post and will now climb my scaffolding to scrape and paint my house. I have rented the scaffolding for another five days. You can only make progress when you have something to stand on. The Republicans used to have Lincoln to stand on. As I wrote when I first started this blog: I took Lincoln with me.
