--- In Dems2008@yahoogroups.com, isabelle <isabelle_ms@...> wrote:
>
> Ci, how did they let their own country be overrun to
> begin with? Why are there so many problems in Africa
> with them killing each other now? I don't know what
> the problem is, but I know you can't blame white
> people for everything.
>
>
>
> --- Citation <citation502@...> wrote:
>
> > New York Times
> > March 20, 2008
> > Op-Ed Columnist
> > Beyond America's Original Sin By ROGER COHEN
> > There are things you come to believe and things
> > you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent
> > part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I
> > bear my measure of shame.
> > As a child, experience is wordless but no less
> > powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was
> > Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that
> > glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!
> > The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off
> > the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my
> > grandfather's house and I wondered.
> > Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to
> > a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor.
> > "You wouldn't want me to drop you," she said.
> > The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to
> > measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the
> > abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of
> > 10. That discrepancy measures a child's panic.
> > A "For Sale" sign was up on what had been the
> > family house. I inquired if I might visit and
> > received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed
> > the mountain behind where my father hiked and where
> > I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.
> > Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at
> > Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit
> > African sojourns. My own was formed of
> > disorientation: I was not quite of the system
> > because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg
> > to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into
> > blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only
> > bench.
> > Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered
> > my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The
> > black women who bathed me as an infant touched my
> > skin, but their world was untouchable.
> > Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I
> > see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red
> > meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of
> > Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of
> > desiring a black woman.
> > A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest
> > parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by
> > Barack Obama's pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery
> > was indeed America's "original sin." Of course, "the
> > brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow" lives on in
> > forms of African-American humiliation and anger that
> > smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.
> > Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S.
> > equivalent of that filthy African harbor.
> > It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual
> > black-white vantage point, to navigate these places
> > where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule,
> > just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that
> > black "anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply
> > wish it away, to condemn it without understanding
> > its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of
> > misunderstanding that exists between the races."
> > Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or
> > since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but
> > not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also
> > to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which
> > Obama has uncovered words.
> > I understand the rage of his former pastor, the
> > Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its
> > expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: "I
> > can no more disown him than I can disown the black
> > community."
> > Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we
> > have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas
> > of Bush's menial mind, with the result that the
> > nuanced exploration of America's hardest subject is
> > almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like
> > Wright, or like Obama's grandmother, is actually
> > inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind
> > actually explore the half-shades of truth?
> > Yes. It. Can.
> > The unimaginable South African transition that
> > Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that
> > leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now
> > in the United States for a presidency that uplifts
> > rather than demeans is a reflection of the
> > intellectual desert of the Bush years.
> > Hillary Clinton said in January that: "You
> > campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose." Wrong.
> > America's had its fill of the prosaic.
> > The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a
> > teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the
> > swimming pools of Johannesburg because "next year
> > they will be red with blood."
> > But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela
> > walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not
> > revenge. Later Mandela would say: "It always seems
> > impossible until it's done."
> > Like countless others, I came to America because
> > possibility is broader here than in Europe's
> > narrower confines. Perhaps it's my African "original
> > sin," but when Obama says he "will never forget that
> > in no other country on earth is my story even
> > possible," I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow
> > receding before the still riveting idea that "out of
> > many we are truly one."
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------------
> > Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.
>
>
>
>
______________________________________________________________________
______________
> Be a better friend, newshound, and
> know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
>
------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Dems2008/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Dems2008/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:Dems2008-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:Dems2008-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
Dems2008-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder