Truth

 Was reading an article about the resurgence of enrollment at the country's historically black colleges and universities. Altogether a good thing but the troubling part was the enrollment was, by far, blacks. That's no surprise really but the reason they enrolled were. Topping the list was being in a school surrounded by "their" people. They felt safe being there, you know, without people of another color being there. In short, what I was surprised to hear was, they wanted to be segregated! That's what they were saying whether they were aware of it or not. I couldn't help but think what Dr. King and a few others would have to say about that. What about those that sat on those stools in Greensboro, North Carolina at Woolworths? What about Rosa? Weren't all of those individuals attempting to be included. It is my understanding that was their purpose. What of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? 

 I was only ten years old then, a notherner and basically unaware of what had been going on down "south" as the saying went. Still, I do recall hearing about riots, protests, sit-ins and clashes. My father had been south in the late 1940's and had a few photographs that showed "colored" water fountains and bathrooms next to "white only" ones. I remember being told how outrageous and wrong all that was. Unbelievable! Like most children I believed all that stuff had happened a long time ago, it wasn't happening today. After all, no one was segregated in my school, no signs like that anywhere to be seen. The black people were no different than anyone else in town, just people. You may, or may not, know them, be friends or work with them. Fact is, it was more about the haves and have nots when I was growing up. 

That was the separation I was aware of. Learned very early on, money talks the loudest and usually buys whatever the speaker wants! Color wasn't an issue, class was. 

  So, I had to think, here we are fifty-eight years after the signing of the civil rights act of '64 and there are young people wanting to go back. Back to being segregated from others. One reason stated was they could embrace their cultural heritage. A heritage of exactly what, I didn't see included. Although dates will vary according to source and just who did the research it is estimated the last African born slave in America died in 1940. The last person that was a slave in America died, probably, in 1971. So, the last person that would, or could have possibly had any direct memory of Africa died eighty-two years ago. The last slave died fifty-five years ago. Can you really inherit something you have no knowledge of? What I mean is I am of German heritage, but I know nothing of being a German. Lederhosen and drinking beer? Is that being a German? Oom-Pah music? What heritage of being a slave would you want to embrace? I fail to see anything of value in that! I would want to be as distant from that as possible! No different than Germans wanting to be as distant from Hitler as possible! 

 What are we dealing with here? Are we dealing with racism, segregation, micro-aggressions and bigotry? Or could it be we are dealing with a cultural difference that neither group understands? Assimilation is what we are talking about. To assimilate yourself to the environment you find yourself living in. Theodore Roosevelt spoke of this in the early part of the twentieth century. Barely forty years since the abolition of slavery in the United States, he didn't include African Americans in that speech for reasons unknown to me, possibly because they weren't identifying themselves in that fashion at that time. That didn't happen until the 1960's. They rejected the term Negro in favor of African American. Today we have Latino-Americans a term we hadn't used in the past either. The previous term being quite offensive. Some things never change across centuries and generations. Man has been calling other men names with a varying degree of derision and disrespect since the beginning. 

 But getting back to what Roosevelt said,  "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic…" The entire passage can be read here, https://caldronpool.com/theodore-roosevelt-on-assimilation-and-multiculturalism-there-is-no-room-in-this-country-f 

 True then, true today.