African Americans unwelcome at swimming pool in 2009

I’ve noticed a complacency not only in myself, but also in my fellow revolutionists.  We cannot become complacent and lulled into the proverbial false sense of victory.  Our President needs our help.  Not only to pat him on the back but also to write to him when we think he’s going the wrong way.

Our President has so much that he must fix that it is up to us to remind him of his promises.  And one is to address the issues that are only felt by African Americans.  I have patience, because the things on his plate are so great.  In the meantime it is up to us to keep our eye on the media and on the majority.

A while ago I wrote you to alert you to what I knew was coming.  1.  the obliteration of affirmative action and 2. the consequential lie that racism is no longer an issues.  The Wall Street Journal went so far as to say:  “One promise of his (Obama) victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr. Obama has a special obligation to help do so.” (emphasis mine) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122586244657800863.html

While I don’t believe that racism is necessarily a barrier, it is most certainly a HUGE HURTLE.  Take this story that broke today, July 8^th:

Pool Boots Kids Who Might “Change the Complexion”Campers sent packing after first visit to swim club

By  KAREN ARAIZA

Updated 11:22 PM EDT, Wed, Jul 8, 2009

NBC Philadelphia

Dymire Baylor says he overheard a woman ask, “What are all these black kids doing?” when he and his friends showed up.

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

Kids at Creative Steps Day Camp were thrilled to go swimming once a week at the Valley Swim Club. But after only one trip to the private club, they were…

“I heard this lady, she was like, ‘Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ She’s like, ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child,’” said camper Dymire Baylor.

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers’ first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,”  (click here to read the rest)

I said it before and I’m going to say it again.  Racism is alive and well in America.  Read some of the comments left by your “average Joe-six pack”:

“I do not like when kids are bussed in by their parents on Halloween to my neighborhood. Is that racist? I doubt it, I pay good money for my home and do not want people that are not residents using our place to get better things. By the way, they are all black and Mexican.”

“Does anyone actually wonder WHY some people in a PRIVATE club wouldn’t want blacks in their pool? It’s not the color in and of itself, it’s how they act. Get any group of them in public, and how do they act? Would you want that around your children?”

What impact will this event have on those children’s lives?  Or will this be just another event in the many events that reinforces the lie that their lives are not as valuable as their white counter-parts?  One idiot posted a comment on the above article stating that African Americans on average have lower IQs.  Not withstanding the fact that once again we are being judged by another group’s standards; I wonder what IQ scores whites would have if the situations were reversed?

Until we have no disparities within the justice system, until we have no disparities in urban schools vs. suburban schools, until Raheem gets the same career opportunities as Tyler we must fight for affirmative action to remain a part of the system.  We must make sure that we are involved not only in our children and grandchildren’s school but attend school board meetings from time to time.  We must also make sure that we do our research when voting for the justices that send our kids to jail at a rate 10x that of their white counter parts.

“Time ain’t as long as it has been…”

McCain, O’Reilly: The White, Christian, male power structure

Racism is so rampant in our culture today – I’d venture to say even more than it was 30 years ago. Racists are so arrogant that on the MAIN STREAM MEDIA Bill O’Reilly and John McCain can sit there on TV and admit and defend the white christian male power structure.

Obama’s Minister Committed "Treason" but When my Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero

When Senator Obama’s preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father — Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer — denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father’s footsteps) rail against America’s sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the “murder of the unborn,” has become “Sodom” by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, “under the judgment of God.” They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama’s minister’s shouted “controversial” comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation’s sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father’s sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our “stand” by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

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Consider a few passages from my father’s immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here’s Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:

If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]… then at a certain point force is justifiable.

And this:

In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools… There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union….

Then this:

There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate… A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion… It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God’s law it abrogates it’s authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation…

Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).

Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad’s statements.

Take Dad’s words and put them in the mouth of Obama’s preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words “godly” and “prophetic” and a “call to repentance.”

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad’s books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the “respectable” evangelical community and he’s still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he’d take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad’s Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler’s Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister’s words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to “bear arms” as “insurance” to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as “fallen away from God” at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the “progressive” Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post “[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the ‘vast right wing conspiracy.’ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/im-already-against-the-n_b_90628.html

Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the “scandal” of Obama’s preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama’s minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.