Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Dude Helps His Fellow Honkies in General and 97 Rock in Particular

The Dude's tips for white people about to talk out their _____ on the subject of race:


  • Ask yourself: would you be COOL or SORE with the fact that your ancestors were enslaved and shipped to America to be slave labor? Yeah.... hmmmm.... never thought about that before... did you?
  • 140 years (the amount of time that's elapsed since the abolition of slavery) does not qualify as ancient history by ANY measure.
  • You are aware that segregation was 100% legal in the US until about 50 years ago, right?!? And you're also aware that the Civil Rights Act wasn't signed into law until about 40 years ago, right?!?

Yes my silly crackers, that's not even a generation ago.

  • Slavery and Jim Crow seem like they happened "ages ago" because they didn't happen to you or your people. You probably read about slavery and Jim Crow in a history book back in school, and odds are good that you probably got defensive about it back then too.
  • Try to think about race with a perspective larger than just your lily white cracker worldview. Try... just try... to think about race if you were African American. Yeah it might be hard... it might even blow your mind... but it's worth trying. Trust me.

We gotta try.

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