Honkies, Honking On

BACK WHEN THAT BIG DUMB black kid was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri by an understandably frightened police officer, and the African-American community took to the streets with placards, our right wing European-American brothers and sisters wondered, or pretended to wonder, exactly what all the fuss was about. Conservatives are often and easily confused; after all, most of them never attended college. College instills thinking skills. They (conservatives) even waxed a tad angry and self righteous over Ferguson, just like they did back in 1964, when Congress was furiously debating and fillibustering whether to treat African-americans like human beings, for the first time in American history. Those damned ungrateful darkies! Don't they know a good sharecrop when they weed one? Hell, we done give 'em their damned freedom, what else do they expect? Acceptance? Equality? The very nerve!.....Meanwhile, a new Department of Justice study proves, using only facts, that Ferguson, Missouri is a racist community (white racism vs. blacks), racism of the usual American sort, subtle and largely unseen, well disguised, with crackers cracking down, ever so indirectly. Arrest and conviction records clearly prove the point. Black man gets stopped by cops, white man drives on down his privileged road. Dark brown dude goes down, locked up, light brown upper middle class dude walks. What we're talking about here is not any proclivity for people of dark pigmentation for criminal activity; we're talking about same crime, same circumstances, vastly different outcomes. Over and over again, all across this great nation, decade after racist decade. My brilliant brother-in-law (caucasian, conservative) offered the brilliant theory that our modern American version of racism is nothing other than pushback for having had racial equality shoved down our societal throats by an overreaching federal government. Oh, those damned civil rights laws! I responded that perhaps its merely of matter of old habits being hard to break. After all, the first slave ship dropped anchor at Jamestown in 1619, only twelve years after the good ship Susan Constant dropped anchor, filled with fortune seekers whose only purpose was to enslave native Americans and steal their alleged gold. (that scheme never worked out). A mere two hundred and forty six years later, the African slaves were "freed", left on their own to fend off great white hatred for another one hundred years, until 1964, then left to fend off petit white hatred for another fifty years, unto the present day. Every sociology department at every major American university has conducted research which clearly indicates the lingering persistence of a fundamentlal feature of American life; white racism against African-Americans. And yet our right wing patriotic American honkies keep honkin' on, like silly geese, that the trouble all began with affirmative action.