I am tired, tired of being blamed and shamed by the left for being white. I was born in 1947, 84 years after the Emancipation Proclamation effectively made every black slave in the United States a free man, woman, or child. My parents, both devout Christians of Scandinavian heritage, were third and fourth generation immigrants who came from Norway and Sweden directly to Minnesota. My ancestors owned no slaves, either in the “old country” or in America, and my parents were careful to instill in me the truth that no matter the color of our skin, we are all equal under the Constitution and in the eyes of God. I grew up south of Terre Haute, attending a school that was mostly white, but when a couple of black families moved into the district my junior year, I never saw nor heard of them being mistreated.
My last semester in college, I student taught at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, which by the late 1960’s had a largely black student population. Uniformed policemen were in the halls because of fights and stabbings that had occurred the previous semester, and mine was one of the few white faces to be seen among either students or staff. Yet, I had a wonderful time. My supervising teacher was also white and nearing retirement, but the students respected her and she respected them. I also treated them respectfully and they were friendly and as eager to learn as any students I have had since then. No one swore at me or called me names. No one refused to listen to me because I was white. I had no discipline problems. We were just an English teacher and her students which is as it should be.
What happened in Charlottesville, Virginia reminded us that there are still violent and hateful groups like the KKK, the Neo-Nazis, and White Supremacists. That one of their number deliberately drove his car into a crowd, killing a young woman was an undeniable act of murder and of domestic terrorism, and that young man deserves the punishment he will get. But the violence would not have occurred at all had not it been determined that a statue of Robert E. Lee, who served the United States of America bravely before he became the most important general of the Confederacy, should be taken down. Had it not been decided that we must bury all remnants of that part of our history, the demonstrators would have had no cause to march.
And, had Antifa, an anarchist group bent on destroying civil order in this country, and Black Lives Matter, whose rhetoric has included such uplifting words as “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” also showed up, the small group of demonstrators would have had their moment in the media and gone home. But the convergence of these three violent and hate-filled groups from both sides of the spectrum could have ended in nothing but violence and to put the blame entirely on the despicable White Supremacists is to ignore the culpability of the equally despicable BLM and Antifa groups. Hatred begets violence and these three groups all harbor hatred towards those who do not agree with their ideas.
But they do not speak for America. Not the KKK. Not the Neo-Nazis. Not the White Supremacists. Not Antifa. Not even Black Lives Matter. If Black Lives Matter spoke for all blacks, no blacks would ever vote Republican. And there are countless black Republicans including these notables:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Walter Williams, professor at George Mason University
Secretary of HUD Ben Carson
Herman Cain, businessman and 2012 presidential candidate
Former Secretary of State Condelissa Rice
Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley
Tom Sowell of the Hoover Institution
Congresswoman Mia Love of Utah
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
Michael Power, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
Allen West, former congressman from Florida
D.C. Circuit judge Janice Roger Brown
Shaquille O’Neal
Harris Faulkner, Anchor of Fox Report and co-anchor of Outnumbered
Stacey Dash, actress and Fox News commentator
Don King, boxing promoter and Trump supporter
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee
Deroy Murdock, nationally syndicated columnists
Lynn Swann, NFL Hall of Famer
Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr., author, minister, pro-life advocate
Darrell Scott, CEO of National Diversity Coalition for Trump
Bruce LeVell, Georgia Republican business leader who also worked for the Trump campaign
Omarosa Manigault, holds a Ph.D. in communications, has worked in the White House, helped
In the Trump campaign with African-American outreach
Shannon Reeves, political scientist and professor in Alabama, former president and executive
director of the NAACP in Oakland, California
Telly Lovelace, national director of black initiatives for the Republican National Committee
T.W. Shannon, Oklahoma’s youngest-ever Speaker of the House in 2013, now a fellow at
Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.
Elroy Sailor, CEO of the largest African-American owned lobbying company in Washington, D.C.
Worked with Trump team to prepare nominees for confirmation hearings
Lynne Patton, Vice president of the Eric Trump Foundation and longtime assistant to the
Trump family.
Ashley Bell, special assistant to the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
Paris Dennard, former White House staffer under President George W. Bush
James Evans, first African-American in Utah state Senate and chair of the Utah Republican Party
Kay Coles James, former director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under President
George W. Bush, now working in personnel policy matters for the Trump administration
Renee Amoore, former deputy chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, invited to work with
Trump transition team with the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kevin Jackson, talk radio host and Fox News contributor
Dr. Ada Fisher first black woman to serve North Carolina as its Republican national
committeewoman. Re-elected twice for four-year terms.
Ken Blackwell, former Ohio treasurer, secretary of state, and 2006 gubernatorial nominee.
Served on Trump’s transition team
Deneed Borelli, Fox News contributor and chief political correspondent at Conservative Review
Ward Connerly, former University of California regent, founder of the American Civil Rights
Institute
Willie Talton, first black Republican to be elected to Georgia General Assembly since
Reconstruction
Elbert Guillory, served in the Louisiana House and Senate, named Legislator of the Year twice
Clarence McKee, Newsmax Insider and key figure in forming Republican platforms since Ronald
Reagan’s first presidential campaign
Michel Faulkner, retired New York Jets defensive lineman, minister and community activist
Joseph Phillips, actor, writer, syndicated columnist
The vast majority of Americans, both liberals and conservatives, are not racist. The past election shows that the liberals in this country could not have elected Barack Obama as the first black president in 2008 by themselves. Many conservatives and independents, myself included, voted for him the first time around, and despite his many failings, were loath to remove him from office after only one term. Americans wanted this first black president to succeed. The fact that he didn’t, was due entirely to his decision to impose his far left ideas on a mostly center-right America. We are largely, whatever the left would have you believe, a country of compassionate, fair-minded, patriotic people and the vast majority of us judge others by their merits and by their actions rather than by the color of their skin.
But, emboldened by a black president and black attorney generals, the most radical blacks in this country began to push for preferential status, based upon the idea that it was owed to them because their ancestors had once been slaves. They asked for and got, “safe spaces” on college campuses where non-blacks were not allowed, all black dorms on some California campuses, preferential admission to universities across the country including Ivy League colleges for which many of them were not educationally prepared. And they wish the United States to pay reparations to them to compensate for the slavery of their ancestors.
I treat people of all colors with the respect that they deserve. I am not a neo-Nazi nor a White Supremacist. I had nothing to do with the slavery that once ran the economy of the south and I feel no guilt because of it. People who are long dead made decisions that I believe were wrong, but I bear no responsibility for their misdeeds any more than I bear responsibility for the victims of serial killers or drug cartels. Nor should any American now living be held responsible for something that was ended over 150 years ago.
If I am not superior to a person of color, then neither is that person of color superior to me. It is time to stop this madness of elevating blacks above whites in order to compensate for what was done, not to them, but to their ancestors. . . that is, if their ancestors actually were plantation slaves as President Obama’s were not. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in his oft quoted “I Have a Dream” speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” That is the definition of equality, and the fact that this country has not quite reached that goal is due as much to the hatred and violence of groups like Black Lives Matter as it is to groups like the KKK and the Neo-Nazis. We must remember the past, not as an excuse for vindictive revenge, but as a lesson in what we must avoid in the future. Black racism is no better than white racism. We must finish with both if we wish to endure as a nation.