Black folks do
"Racism was a form of madness, a pathological hatred and cruelty that took its most despicable form in outright murder. Lynching — which took the lives of hundreds (though not, as has often been alleged, thousands) of blacks between 1890 and 1940 ..." — Mona Charen
I found the presumptuous quote above in the Atlanta Journal/ Atlanta Constitution on October 24. It was beneath the title, "Grim racial past shows our surprising progress".
If we are to believe what is implied in those words, then racism is gone from US society. The writer is not the least bit concerned about racism. She wrote the article, for the most part, to promote her pals' book.
I am rarely surprised but always offended when I see or hear self-serving white folks presume to be authorities on the intricacies of the black experience. Charen writes of lynchings as if she had been present at every one; and she uses "was", as if no black folk are being lynched these days.
Unfortunately, that is how it is for many if not most whites in the US. All they need do is read a racist's latest book and, bingo! no more racism. It is gone with the wind.
The sad truth is that only a few white folk have the courage, personal experience and right to speak or write about racism from a black perspective. For example, when Rheta Grimsley Johnson honestly asked, "Who Killed Buck Davis?" in the same newspaper on November 9, she nullified Charen's political parroting, because she once was a resident of the community she wrote about. She did not just read a book. She knows her topic well.
According to Johnson, the last time Buck Davis was seen, he was being beaten by white men, and evidence clearly shows that he was "dragged with a rope ... behind a pickup truck", either before or after he was killed. At the very least, there is a connotation of a lynching about his killing. I suspect that Charen would not agree with me.
One morning not long ago on Ted Turner's so-called "Super Station", I watched a huge white man beating and kicking a much smaller black man into an unconscious pulp. (Beside the ring there stood a very white old man, dressed in white shoes, a white full length coat/tuxedo, white shirt, tie, white handlebar moustache and Panama hat. Behind him there was an audience full of white children.)
As the black man lay motionless on the mat, the white man produced a length of rope and tried to put it around the neck of the black man before his intention was discovered by the referee, who then officially ended the so-called "wrestling match".
I wonder if Charen could tell me the message that the little white boys in the audience got, as they cheered the winner. Even in the child world of Saturday morning TV make-believe, white men encourage the lynching of black men. I suspect Charen would call it "harmless TV fun".
It was only six or seven years ago that white men killed a young black man and then hung his body, by the neck, on the lower limb of a tree in an Alabama community's tree-lined streets, as a demonstration of the power of the Ku Klux Klan.
We can he thankful that all white columnists are not like Charen. Yet, it is her kind who get the bulk of publishing ink in US newspapers. Of course, I wrote her a letter of complaint, but I do not expect her even to read, let alone answer, my letter. After all, I am a black man on death row in Georgia. I suspect that she would think that I could not possibly know as much, and certainly not more, about being black in the USA as she does.
Charen is a very political person, and her columns clearly show that she follows the party line. Black people have very little control politically, but perhaps she will pay attention to her colleague Tom Teepen, a white man, who is a national correspondent for Cox Newspapers. His words really echoed my own when, in support of affirmative action, he wrote, "Politicians are prospering with the sly fiction that [the US] is now color blind (except for pesky blacks who keep trying to tell whites that race still features very much in their lives. It is one of the enduring racial conceits of white America that it knows more about what it is like to be black than black folks do.)"
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA. Brandon and his friends are trying to raise funds to pay for a lawyer for his appeal. If you can help, please make cheques payable to the Brandon Astor Jones Defence Account and post to 41 Neutral St, North Sydney NSW 2060, or any Commonwealth Bank, account No. 2127 1003 7638.]