The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 6 of 14)

br> Santa Rosa, California /p>

I read your article about the Obama-Wright flap, and there is an element to this story that you are missing. Indeed, much of the press is missing this point.

You minimize and trivialize the pernicious, virulent, and lasting effects of state sponsored racism in the United States. I will be the first to admit that the United States of America has made spectacular progress in becoming a more open and just society. However, many white journalists look at the world as it exists today in a vacuum, as if the past has been eradicated by the passage of landmark legislation and Supreme Court cases.

I am a 54 year old African American, Ivy League educated attorney. In my lifetime, I have personally experienced acts that you can't imagine. Moreover, I dare say, that if you took the time to speak to any African American over the age of 45 -- anybody -- and ask them to candidly tell you their experiences with racism in this country, you would understand that this is not a figment of their imaginations, that it had real and lasting impacts, and that no law can fix or undo the harm that has been done.

My grandfather, who was half-white and half-black, the product of a master-slave relationship, started and maintained a thriving dairy business in South Carolina. He was doing well. His children were being carried to school in horse drawn carriages in the early 1900s. Apparently, he was doing too well. He was driven out of town, and forced to relocate to New York City, where he was no longer an owner of a business but performed various odd jobs -- painter, building superintendent, security guard -- to support his family in Harlem. My father was the 10th out of 11 children.

Let's stop here for a moment. This is a key point. Had my grandfather been allowed to progress as any other American, then he would have owned property, and had an inheritance that would have transformed the lives of those after him.

My father was the first in his family to attend college, and he eventually graduated from Medical School. He received a scholarship to college earned a degree in Chemistry. He then attended medical school and finished in three years before becoming a professor at the Howard Medical School, and starting a Medical Practice in the Washington area.

Let me stop and tell a couple of stories here. My father never became Board Certified in Internal Medicine, even though he taught the subject in school. He repeatedly passed the written examination with flying colors, but then flunked the oral examination. In one of his oral examinations, his white examiners gave him a Hispanic patient to diagnose -- who spoke no English -- and flunked him when he could not make the proper diagnosis. When my father wanted to buy a house, there was only one bank in Washington that was giving loans to blacks. He was one of the first doctors to integrate the staff at various hospitals in the Washington, DC. However, one day driving home from music lessons, he was stopped and taken to jail on a "routine traffic check." When the officer discovered that it was Dr. McKnight that they had arrested, the Chief tried to get him to leave the station. My father refused to go. His response, "You arrested me. Prosecute me." My mother and the parish priest went to jail to get my father. He relented.

I remember all of this clearly. I was then sent to an all white Prep School. I was a good student and athlete. I finished in the top 20 of my class. But, along the way, many things happened to me. One day, riding the bus, a much older and bigger kid, looked me in the eye, said the word, "Nigger" and spit in my face. I was a 7th grader. He was a 9th grader. I stared him in the face, and wiped it off.

I was 6th man on the JV basketball team. We were playing in VA. As I stripped my sweats off to enter the game, the students from the opposing school pulled out little confederate flags and waved them at me, jeering and insulting me. We won the game.

Playing a football game in VA, I caught as pass and raced 40 yards to the end zone. There, a white referee said to me in a southern accent, "Sorry Boy, I'm not going to let you have this one." He then pulled a flag out of his pocket, and called a penalty that only the line judge could have seen 40 yards away.

In my first year of college, I was walking through downtown Providence, RI, and a car load of kids drove by and screamed Nigger and all kinds of stuff. I reacted and the older kids told me to hold back because I wasn't in DC anymore.

Although, truth be told, being in DC was no picnic. During my teenage years, my friends and I were stopped so many times for "routine traffic checks" that we regularly carried note pads to write down the badge numbers of the police officers. Once the police saw us recording their badge numbers, they were not as likely to misbehave. However, we were thrown against cars and they did brandish shotguns in our faces. All of us are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and managers now.

In law school, I was walking back from the library, a police car slowed to a crawl driving next to me as I walked. The window came down and the officer extended his arms out the window, gun in hand, pointed at me. We proceeded like this for a block. He said nothing to me. I then stopped and raised my hands in the air. He pulled the trigger. Instead of a flash and a bullet, the trigger clicked. The police man said, "Bang, Bang, you're dead." He laughed and drove away.

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