UNDERSTANDING
THE WEDGE
PART 1 of 2
By
Jon Christian Ryter
August 6, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
I want you to imagine for a moment that the 20th Annual White Folks Freedom Fund Banquet was being held on President George W. Bush's watch, and his Agriculture Secretary, former Nebraska governor Mike Johanns fired his Director of Rural Development for a small Southern State—say...Georgia. And, let's say, she was a white woman who, in her federally appointed position, controlled the spending of a billion dollars. And, let's further imagine that, on some date during the Bush-43 years, this white political appointee addressed the "White Folks" assemblage and admitted to her audience that, 24-years earlier, while working for a private co-op, she deliberately discriminated against a black farmer because of his race.
Let's say that in her speech to the 20th Annual White Folks Freedom Fund Banquet, she admitted to her audience that "...the first time I was faced with having to help a black farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking but, he was trying to show me he was [equal] to me...I know what he was doing..." (A voice in the audience shouts, "that's right!"). She continued: "But he had come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was [equal] to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many white people had lost their farm land. And here I was, faced with having to help a black person save their land. So, I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.,,I assumed the Dept. of Agriculture sent him to me. Either that, or the Georgia Dept. of Agriculture. And, uh...he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So, I took him to a black lawyer that had attended some of the training that we had provided because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farm. So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him."
And, finally, let's imagine that she wholly redeemed herself by admitting to her audience that shortly after that meeting she had an epiphany that it's not about color, but it was simply about being poor. "...It's not so much about being black...you know," she said, "it opened my eyes."
Now let's imagine her white boss, the former governor of Nebraska, Mike Johanns, received a call from Bush-43 who suggested what she did 24 years ago was tinged with racism and might come back to bite the Bush-43 Administration in the backside, and suggested it might be best for all concerned if she was fired. So, let's imagine, that Johanns made a telephone call to the woman and fired her for something she did a quarter century earlier—but who actually corrected the misstep and helped the person to whom she initially denied help to. You can be certain that when the story of the termination reached the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Bush-43 bureaucrat would be, and rightly so, be branded as a racist.
There would be no "wait a minute" from the media reminding their readers of the white bureaucrat's saving grace epiphany that poor is poor regardless of the color of the skin of the farmer. And there would have been no reminder that those in major or minor positions of authority in the government have an obligation to help those in need—regardless of the color of their skin since the government of the United States professes to be completely color blind, or regardless of the fact that brief racial indiscretion happened a quarter century earlier.
Instead, the New York Times and the Washington Post would not have passed up the opportunity to paint Bush and his Agriculture Secretary, Mike Johanns, with the same racist brush, demanding to know why such a horrible woman was ever hired in the first place. That was then. This is now. The incident happened in a different time with a different Agriculture Secretary. This time around, the Agriculture Secretary is Tom Vilseck, the former Democratic governor of Iowa and the guy in the White House is Barack Obama.
And it was not a white woman denying needed assistance to a black man whose farm was about to foreclosed; but a black woman, Georgia Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod who admitted that during the Reagan-Bush-41 years, she did not use the "full force of her office" to help a distressed white farmer who was about to lose his farm to foreclosure. It must be noted that when Sherrod declined to help a white farmer, Roger Spooner, other than to refer him to a "white lawyer," she did not work for the government. She worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperative-Land Assistance Fund. Spooner now drives a Peterbilt and hauls fertilizer to different farms in Georgia. When the story broke about Sherrod, Eloise's son called CNN and gave them their number. Eloise said she did it because "...Shirley helped us when we really needed help." The FHA Director, whom the Spooners went to originally for help, and whom Eloise referred to only as "Diane," told the Spooners they would be evicted, and the best thing they could do was pack up and move. Furthermore, in total fairness to Sherrod, after her poor vs. color epiphany, she found Spooner and, according to Eloise Spooner, now 82, Sherrod actually saved their farm from foreclosure.
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In fact, because of her assistance to the white couple, the Spooners and Sherrod became friends. From the Spooner experience, Sherrod did put color aside and worked to help save the farms of both white and black farmers. Thus, it must be stressed that this article was not targeting Ms. Sherrod as a racist. This article was written solely to show the disparity in the application of the term "racist." Resident Barack Hussein Obama, a man who hates the white blood that courses through his own veins, reportedly ordered Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilseck to fire Sherrod in order to show a lack of racial bias he does not possess at a time when he's sinking in the polls like a ton of bricks in quicksand. It was the same type of rush to judgment Obama displayed prior to the July 30, 2009 Beer Summit at the White House when Harvard professor and race-relations "expert" Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley met with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in the Rose Garden for beer under the canopy of a magnolia tree. As he did in the Sherrod incident, Obama made a rush to judgment in the Gates matter by accusing the Cambridge police and, particularly, Sgt. Crowley of acting stupidly in the arrest of one of Obama's former instructors at Harvard.
In that instance, Obama said that Gates showed ID to prove he was breaking into his own home. At that point, he was arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama continued that "...I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in [the Gates case]. But I think it's fair to say, number one, that any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And, three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact." And, of course, that statement by America's first black occupant of the Oval Office, elevated the racial overtones of this incident in the media. Only, other than the accusations leveled by Gates and Obama, there was none. It was a simple case of police officers, responding to a call from a female neighbor who saw two black men trying to break into Gates' Cambridge home, demanded to see identification to prove that the two black men who were forcibly entering the home belonged there. The two men were, of course, Gates and his chauffeur.
Just returning from a trip to China, I wonder how Gates would have felt if two black intruders actually broke into his home? And learning that police were called, and responded to the scene, only to drive off without checking the IDs of the intruders after one of them said he was Henry Gates? It is likely all three officers who responded to the Gates' resident would have been suspended. Gates was arrested not because he broke into his own home, but because of his arrogance in responding to the police who asked to see identification to prove he was who he said he was. Instead, he berated the police with racial epithets. After being repeated warned if he did not stop he would be arrested, the police arrested him. The charges were later dropped. While Gates insisted that police apologize to him for arresting him for hurling racial epithets at them, the Gates arrest was not a Rosa Parks moment. It was the arrest of an arrogant college professor who peppered the police with threats and racial insults.
Sometimes all of us—white, black, brown or sky-blue pink—are too quick to play the race card. But no one in the country is faster on the draw than community activist turned White House occupant Barack Hussein Obama. In the case of Gates, every black community activist in the country jumped into the fray to lend "vocal support" to Obama and Gates by accusing the Cambridge police of racism in the incident—and, of course, to claim part of the glory for labeling the Cambridge police department and Sgt. James Crowley as racists. Middlesex County Prosecutors conducted a year-long investigation of the Cambridge Police Dept. (triggered by complaints by Gates).
They released their findings on June 22, 2010 a full year after the incident took place. They found that police were completely justified in arresting Gates. The prosecutor and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting dug into the arrest history of the Cambridge Police Dept. to see is there appeared to be a disproportionate level of arrests of blacks for disorderly conduct (considered nationwide to be the most abused and most discretionary charge filed in the nation's criminal justice system. In Cambridge). However, 57% of those arrested for disorderly conduct were white. Only 34% were black. A deeper investigation showed that most of those arrested were arrested for yelling at police, and hurling obscenities—precisely what Gates did.
Racism—whether white-on-black, black-on-white, white-on-brown, brown-on-white or black, or black-on-brown—is a stain on society. God created all men equal and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution made it law. Society must recognize that every minority (including the American white male) is equal. Although the social progressives (communists) among us who wrote both the rulebook and the playbook on racism, insist that racism is exclusively a white-on-black stain on society, it is equally (if not moreso today) a black-on-white or brown-on-white stain on society. As far as we have come as a nation, racial prejudice still exists in America.
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Racism hurts all of us. Not just the targets of the racists and the bigots, but the rest of the nation as well. Because racism, like multilingualism, is a wedge that is artfully used by the social progressives who champion black causes and the "constitutional" right of immigrants to speak and be educated in their native languages to divide the American people. Why would anyone deliberately do that? Because a divided people cannot unite against a dictatorial government. For part two click below.
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