A coworker told me she purchased the movie "The Butler" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1327773/. She told me she was disappointed about the way Anglos were portrayed because not everyone was racist and tried to discriminate against Blacks. I will give her that. But then she used the example of her uncle who used "the N word" because that was the way he was raised, and even Black people referred to themselves that way, and he really did not mean it. I countered. I said people really did mean it, or why did they pass Jim Crow laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws. If someone is discerning, they may have been raised a way to treat people, but they have a choice in what they do as adults.
Jim Crow laws were a deliberate, institutionalized, legalized, systematized way of discriminating against Afro-Americans. They were demeaning and dehumanizing laws. There was no intent to have "separate but equal." The intent was domination of one race by another.
We lived through the era of fighting for integration which was the law of the land long before it was practiced. How can anyone say that Anglos did not mean it. They fought tooth and nail to keep White Male Dominance. And even today, there are still undertones of White Male Dominance in our world. Things have become better, and we do have an Afro-American man elected as the President. But he is very aware he is one step away from being treated like other Afro-Americans who do not have his face and name recognition, power and influence. To my knowledge, he has only referred to that once, but he is aware of it.
White washing our past serves no purpose. This is what our country did. We cannot deny it. We must face facts and deal with what was and what is.
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