I was raised in Washington D.C. in a lower middle class black neighborhood and -yes- my first best friend when I was about 4 or 5 was another child my age who was black. Also, traveling as a child with my mother on the bus to downtown Washington to pay our electric bills in person (because my parents had no checking account) and seeing brown skinned people was as natural to me as seeing blue sky. Never did I get an inkling from my mother or anyone else who raised me that blacks were any less human than white or Jewish people. The only time that I learned about race tensions is when I learned or saw that some militant blacks were angry at white or Jewish people.
Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 and with his death came also the death of the legitimate
civil rights movement. Even as a child, when I saw him briefly on TV, I could recognize his nobility and sense of sincerity. In the Yeshivah in my free time I would listen to speeches of his from records that
I borrowed from the library. I'm not saying that there was no more need for race consciousness after Dr. King departed us but in my opinion his movement addressed institutional racism effectively. Individual
bigotry amongst all groups toward one another will always exist with some but natural discussion and societal evolution is the antidote for that. The genders will always struggle understanding each other and differences between people's nationalities, religions, financial class or sexual orientation will always be something to adapt to or learn more tolerance towards. Even if one were to argue that a civil rights movement is still necessary for race, today's civil rights leaders, namely, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakan, etc. are certainly not the messengers of peace and harmony. To this I might add, that even our President is in the race consciousness building business, as I will demonstrate later on.
Al Sharpton is first and foremost the heir apparent of Dr. King's movement. However, he's been involved with nefarious and fraudulent cases of so-called discrimination. I'll cite just 4: 1) Tawana Brawley 2) Freddie's Fashion Mart and 3) Korean produce store boycott 4) Fatal accident of Gavin Cato - Crown Heights riot.
The Tawana Brawley case in 1987 was that of a 15 yr. old black female who accused 6 white people including police officers and a prosecutor in upstate NY, of assault and rape. She was found in the woods inside a garbage bag with racial epithets written on it and her body was smeared with feces. Al Sharpton was preeminent in decrying what white America had done to this black child. The case was a national sensation but it turned out after a grand jury hearing investigation that the whole scene was staged herself, to avoid the ire of her father finding out that she was pregnant. The ones who were accused, successfully sued her for libel and Al Sharpton himself was sued as well.
Freddy's Fashion Mart involved a case in Harlem in 1995 where a black record store owner was forced out of his location due to an increase in rent. The increase came about as a large African American church landlord raised its rent on a Jewish business, Freddy's Fashion Mart, a clothing store, which in turn had to raise the rent on its subtenant, an African American music record shop. Sharpton held rallies in front of the store calling the new merchant a "white interloper" (even though the Jewish white merchant had been in that location for 40 years) and on his radio show two of his guests made reference to "crackers" and "bloodsuckers". Within a matter of days the white Jewish store was set on fire from one who had attended one of the rallies and 7 innocent lives were lost in the fire.
The boycott of a Korean produce store in Flatbush that began in January of 1990 and ended in May of 1991, was about an incident where a Korean store employee was charged with the assault of a black Haitian woman customer who was accused of stealing produce. Though the store employee was being dealt with in the criminal justice system the store was boycotted for 17 months by black residents and was lead by militant black leaders such as Sonny Carson and Al Sharpton. David Dinkins, then the mayor of NY, would not enforce a State Supreme Court Judge's order for the boycott to stay at least 50 feet away from the store. A Korean store across the street was similarly boycotted. In fact, all told, Korean groceries have had about 15 separate boycotts held by African Americans from 1981 through 1995. Through this period race relations between the two groups naturally were extremely tensed. The owner of the boycott in Flatbush ultimately had to sell the store in order to extricate himself from the situation.
In 1991 a Hasidic driver in Crown Heights, as part of a motorcade escorting the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Z'L, mistakenly thinking that because they had a police escort that he had the right of way, tragically hit a young Guyanese boy by the name of Gavin Cato and one other child with his car. The driver immediately tried saving the boys stricken but was pounced upon by 3 to 4 thugs in the area. Hatzalah came and followed shortly were police and ambulance cars. Under police direction, Hatzalah whisked the Hasidic driver out of there who was in danger of being severely beaten or killed. The ambulance took Gavin Cato to the hospital where he unfortunately died. 3 hours after the accident, a group of about 200 black teenagers surrounded a Jew by the name of Yankel Rosenbaum and one of teenagers, by the name of Lemrick Nelson, stabbed and killed Mr. Rosenbaum.
At the funeral of Gavin Cato, Al Sharpton spoke about "diamond dealers" and referred to Hatzalah as being an apartheid volunteer service. For 3 days blacks rioted in Crown Heights looting stores, injuring Jews and vandalizing their cars and homes which they recognized because the Jewish homes were marked by Mezuzot. Shots were fired at police as well as bottles and bricks thrown at them. The commissioner's car along with other police vehicles were overturned by the rioters.
Our president, Barack Obama has injected race where it need not have been in at least 3 events: 1) His campaign against John McCain where he said that McCain's campaign will employ a racial tactic of saying that because Obama is black and different people shouldn't vote for him.
2) In the Cambridge Mass. police incident with Henry Louis Gates Jr. - wherein a neighbor called the police indicating that their might be a break-in in the house of prominent historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.. When the police arrived, not recognizing or knowing of him the police asked Gates to identify himself. Gates, a professor of American history and specializing in American race relations, experienced this as racial profiling and became irate - yelling at the police from his external porch. The police, classifying this a public disturbance, arrested him for disorderly conduct. Obama, when asked about this in a press conference, admitted that he didn't know the exact circumstances but proceeded to declare that the "Cambridge police acted stupidly" for arresting Mr. Gates. He justified his (premature) conclusion based on this country's history of police making false arrests.
3) The President in our recent case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, saying to the parents of Trayvon Martin that if he, the President, had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. That racial interjection was made more than a year before the trial of George Zimmerman would even begin but Obama was admonishing the country that we have to do soul searching to see how this could have happened and that federal, state and local authorities need to investigate the facts of the case.
Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, some black Congressmembers from Florida and Illinois as well as the NAACP were all convinced that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled and murdered. Representative Frederica Wilson from Florida proclaimed that "Trayvon was hunted down like a rabid dog!" This leads me to reiterate the basic facts of the current Zimmerman murder trial case gleaned from court testimony:
George Zimmerman, who was head of the neighborhood watch starts to investigate what he sees as a suspicious person in the area. About 5 minutes thereafter people are calling in to 911 with screams heard and eventually a gunshot sound in the background of the calls. Zimmerman emerges with a bloody nose and lacerations and bumps on the back of his head. Court testimony demonstrated over and over again that Zimmerman had a credible plea of self defense. No racial profiling on the part of Zimmerman was ever testified to. On the contrary, according to testimony, Trayvon Martin, when being bothered that Zimmerman was following him, uttered in a phone call to his friend that a "creepy --- cracker" was following him.
The circumstances in the cases mentioned above were manipulated by race hucksters capitalizing on what really is a racist treatment of blacks in this country but not in the way that they say. African Americans in the inner city have had conditions that are horrible with their home life, neighborhood and in their schools.
The public schools are riddled with fighting and bullying where learning is the furthest things from their minds. The neighborhoods are full of shootings and drug dealing. Their homes are fractured -with often the fathers missing and too often otherwise compromised parenting. Yes, Sharpton and company have a point. We have allowed the liberals to mess up the lives of too many African American citizens and for that we are all guilty. We have not stood up to the liberals to stop their racist policies of not allowing school choice, not ridding the crime and guns in the urban communities and by allowing liberal government policy to reward fatherlessness and too often dysfunctional mothering.
All of this adds up to make children in the inner city so ill equipped to grow up happily and productively, the way all of G-d's children are entitled to. Instead of liberals owning up to the dreadful conditions that they have wrought upon us all, these liberals, be they white or black, demand that others keep paying for their mistakes! Instead of paying attention to the carnage of black on black crime, such as in Chicago on the July 4th weekend, when there were 48 shootings and 11 deaths, black militant race hustlers and white-guilt liberals have us paying for their destructive policies with no end in sight.
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