From a Rope to a Paper and Pencil
excerpts from “Too Damn Little, Too Damn Late,” Salon by Debra J. Dickerson, June 28, 2005
You were expecting, maybe, gratitude for your lynching apology? You should live so long. Here are my top 10 reactions to America’s latest patronizing attempt to repent its racism:
1. Bite me.
2. Damn right, the least you could do.
3. Mighty white of you.
4. Gee, couldn’t you have waited just a little longer — until even the trees from which the “strange fruit” swung were dead?
5. I’m not impressed, but then, I’m bell-curved. What do I know?
6. Thanks for kicking our asses so hard, and for so long, that we were forced to develop entire art forms around our oppression.
7. Try not to break your arm patting yourselves on the back.
8. Give us back the land, the businesses and the unpaid debts that were the true cause of many lynchings. You sleaze bags!
9. Gee, was there no appropriate Hallmark card? Let a sister help you out:
Sorry I castrated your granddad. My bad.
What’s 300 years of raping your ancestors among friends?
Sticks and stones may break your bones … Oops. They already did.
And my topmost reaction to your lame-ass, late-ass lynching apology:
10. Thanks for absolutely, positively nothing. You feel better. We feel
worse. Deja bloody vu all over again.
Here’s the problem with apologizing for stuff like slavery, Jim Crow laws and lynching — and the problem with digging up Emmett Till or prosecuting Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old man, for murder 41 years after it happened: It’s too damn little, much too damn late. Does America’s contempt for us never cease? How else to describe the refusal of 15 senators to cosponsor the lynching apology bill, and its late-night voice vote? For all we know, the bill was passed by one lonely, overcaffeinated senator who happened by in search of an Ambien.
The crux of the matter is this: Had America ever truly repented its racism, no apology would be needed now. Our schools and neighborhoods wouldn’t be segregated. The term “driving while black” need never have been coined. Oprah, who routinely graces the list of America’s most admired people, could shop in an “upscale” neighborhood without a camera crew to mark her as a “daylight white.” The words “black” and “white” would be as giggle inducing as “23 skidoo” and “Chi-town.”
So I’m with the lynching descendant who said: “I won’t accept their apology … What they used to do with a rope, today they do with a paper and pencil.”
July 6th, 2005 at 7:46 am
Lynching apology will not do. If the white southerners are truly sorry for what happened they need to stop waving the confederate flag and join the rest of America. Schools should not be named after criminals such as Nathaniel Bedford Forrest and traitors such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. States would takeover education funding from localities and distribute the money evenly through all school districts. Whites like to say that they are against affirmative action because they believe in equality of opportunity not equality of results. We have equality of results (AA) because the whites are not willing to provide equality of opportunity.
Finally, there is a need to repent. Whites wonder why minorities are not very sympathetic to Natalee Holloway. If Holloway were not white southerners there might be more sympathy. Some believe that their ancestors were plantation owners who oppressed blacks and what goes around comes around. I dont buy this…however, I can honestly say that the Holloway family now feels exactly what Emett Till’s family felt when justice was denied. Perhaps now the white southerners feel exactly the same way as the victims of Civil Rights murders felt back in the 1950s and 1960s.
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:45 pm
It’s somewhat ironic that White Privilege.com has submitted a piece by Debra Dickerson. The woman is considered to be a Black conservative, if an iconoclastic one.