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@yahoo.com> 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."
>
>
>
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