Stupid white people

There are times when I'm embarrassed to be white. Like when other white people offer their opinions of black people, culture, or history. Usually, they sound like whiny, naive, defensive little kids: "Hey, how come black kids can say 'nigger' an' white people can't? It's not faaaaaaaaiiiir!" (Why would any white person want to use that word? I'm confused. Especially when you consider how many blacks would love it if the term vanished from the English language.)

Anyway, you already know about Bill O'Reilly's educational trips to soul food restaurants. Now comes Z-list celebrity, model, and reality TV star Adrianne Curry saying she's not racist and sounding, well...racist.

This is gonna be hard guys. I LOVE the comedians on BET. I also LOVE the fact that they play my favorite show of all time, In Living Color. However, I do not believe in seperating ANY RACE in America. WE ARE AMERICANS! How dare we have Black History Month! In my eyes, the Native Americans deserve it MUCH more, seeing how we destroyed their ENTIRE SOCIETY. There are hardly any of them left! They also have been proven to have the WORST living conditions on their reservations. I want AN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH. One where we learn about EVERY race, ALL OF OUR LEADERS, EVERYONE! I think by having a month dedicated to one race, and not one for any other, is RACIST. Every fund set up to only help people of one race is SICK and RACIST.

Ms. Curry, needless to say, got a lot of negative reactions to this. So, she tried to clarify what she said. And she made Bill O'Reilly look smart and insightful by comparison. (I bet Bill-O at least knows how to use a spell checker.) Anyhow, Deb's advice to Ms. Curry is as follows:

Move the f**k on yourself. It would be really nice if the world would let us, but it is too busy trying to make sure that we always stay at the bottom of the barrel.

Speaking as a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, red-haired, freckled Caucasian, I wish white people would shut up about Black History Month and college scholarships for people of color and all those other things that whining whites claim are "reverse racism." If this country didn't have a tortured history of slavery, brutal oppression, legalized discrimination, and outright genocide against nonwhites, these things would not exist.

The "get over it and move on" crowd also conveniently forgets how recent the Civil Rights movement really was--and what happened to the leaders of this movement. There are millions of Americans--black and white--who are old enough to remember life before Brown vs. the Board of Education. You can't negate the impact of history by shaking your finger and saying, "Get over it, already!"

Nor can anyone deny that racism in its purest, ugliest form still exists. I know one lady who is, even today, afraid to set foot in Howard Beach, Queens. And she lives only 10 minutes away.

In the words of Leonard Pitts:

As to the issue of "getting over it:" I find it intriguing that no one sees a preoccupation with the past when we endlessly celebrate the Greatest Generation for its World War II exploits or commiserate with the soldiers of Vietnam for their suffering. No one has difficulty understanding how the past impacts the present when we're talking about, say, how a 30 year old political scandal -– Watergate -– reverberates in the cynicism of the succeeding generation.

It seems we only have these problems with the past when the past in question has to do with African Americans and their history. Which suggests to me that the issue here is less black folks' preoccupation with our racial yesterday than some white folks' fear of it. And that's a problem beyond my control.

Whites should quit the mealy-mouthed comments about uppity Negroes blacks who won't forget the past. Americans shouldn't forget--much as some of them would like to.

I have more to say on this subject, but Bionic Woman is on in about 5 minutes. Katee Sackoff of Battlestar Galactica is a bad guy! Wheeeee!