I am fifty five and can still remember the Watts riots being played out on T.V. In those days, I think people of color had a lot more to complain about than they do today. I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood in Orange County, California. The only minorities in my school were Jewish, although a couple of Asian kids had been adopted by white people and raised in the American culture so they didn't seem different from us.
In those days, I saw clips of black people complaining that the police refused to protect their neighborhoods because they were racists. I wouldn't be surprised. Like the current president's grandmother, my grandmother was afraid of seeing a black man on the street. The first time I told her I was dating one, she asked, "Are you scared?"
Like my father, this man had a master's degree in engineering and owned a two-story house. He was handsome and well-spoken and it never occurred to me to be afraid of him, even though we met online.
My father used the most derogatory words on earth to describe black people, words that truly hurt my ears. He and my mother refused to by a house because the neighbors next door were black. But during his final days, while suffering the effects of chemotherapy, I walked in to see a black man sitting in the chair beside him and holding his hand. At first, I thought I had gotten the wrong house! The black man turned out to be his doctor and he had come out to have a man to man talk with my dad because he was dying.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I had friends and black friends. No black student crossed the threshold of the schools I attended until high school and then there was only one family. I was crazy about the Jackson 5, the Osmonds, not so much. I would gave gladly married Michael, Tito, Jermaine, Jackie, or Marlon. I even had a crush on Bill Cosby and wanted to look like Diana Ross or Diahann Carroll when I grew up.
My son was born in 1978 and his best friend was Murray. He was a boy of color who lived nearby and I was constantly hounded to set up a play date with him. The fact that the boy was a different color from us was never mentioned.
Ten years later, my daughter constantly talked about her counselor and her English teacher in high school. When I finally met the two women on back-to-school night, I was surprised to see that both women were black. My daughter hadn't even mentioned it. Not that it mattered, but in my grandmother's day, the color was always mentioned upfront.
Race relations have come along way but people with a certain agenda refuse to acknowledge it.
I find it insulting to the American people and particularly white people, that the governor of Missouri is bowing to the will of rap singers and people with neck tattoos who aren't even from Ferguson, Missouri. The facts as the public knows them are an aggressive young man entered a store, grabbed cigars and shoved people around. A few minutes later, a police officer had some kind of injury to his face and the aggressive young man was shot dead.
The fact that he was unarmed makes no difference to me. Emotions were apparently running high as was seen in the video tape and like everyone else police officers want to protect their safety. Michal Brown's family is delusional. He was not a choir boy as they would have us believed. His cousin claims that Michael paid for the cigars and yet no exchange of money is seen. How stupid do they think the public is? I taught my kids that if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you and the parents of Michael Brown should have done the same thing.
