Saturday, October 11, 2008
Black and Green
Van Jones has started a revolution and it WILL be televised. In fact, it already has been and it's all over YouTube. Jones, a Yale-graduated lawyer, developed the Green For All movement as the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights out of Oakland, California, and if you don't know about him and his work already, you've been hiding at the back of the cave, my friend. His new book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, suggests that we need to train low income and disenfranchised youth in the United States how to carry us into a more sustainable future as a nation and as a race (as in, the human). This would keep us from destroying ourselves using the non-green practices of the past and keep us from destroying a whole generation (or more) of U.S. citizens who are presently languishing in frustration at the bottom of a barrel that is getting deeper all the time.
Like dust, wrote Maya Angelou, African-Americans rise and rise and rise. And ain't that the truth?
I can't help but think about the misguided young man who was captured by the media this week saying that his wife is pregnant and the thought of Barack Obama being the President of the United States scares him. He would, we must assume, feel "safe" with a White guy who is widely known in Washington for flying off the handle at a moment's notice when he doesn't get his way. He would, I suppose, be comfortable with a back-up plan in the person of a woman who has been officially found to abuse her power even as Governor of a state having fewer residents than the city of New Orleans. But he's AFRAID of Obama. And Jones? And Martin Luther King, Jr.? And Angelou? And...?
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2 comments:
"He would, we must assume, feel "safe" with a White guy who is widely known in Washington for flying off the handle at a moment's notice when he doesn't get his way."
God bless America for personal opinion, but personally assuming someone is being racist when you have no factual evidence to back it up is just wrong. Furthermore, per your assumption, "we must assume" commands us to do so. I don't know about other people and I don't plan on telling them to assume anything.
Who's to say the person just did not agree with his policies or belief's?
If nothing else, let everyone assume on their own instead of pushing your own agenda on others.
Note: This is probably the part where you will call me either uneducated or a racist because I am white and just never have gone through racism. In any case that is your right as a free American, and myself as an American do not agree with your opinion and chose to inform you of my own.
No, Anonymous, this is the part where I remind you that I didn't ask you to read this in the first place. I've been writing a blog on race for three years and you don't even have an internet identity, but you want to come into MY space and tell me how I should and should not write. I didn't call the man a racist. I called into question his saying he was "scared" of Barack Obama, a statement I think suggests that he is misguided. If you're agitated by what you read here, you needn't read it, you know.
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