Since Barak Obama came on the national scene We have been fumbling over the conversation of racism in America. Whites have told Blacks that we are too sensitive and we should let it go. Blacks have struggled with where we are now and how far we have to go. We see it, we live it, we know it…..but we really do have white friends, really good ones too. Then, there are the white family members, we love them as sure as our heart beats. But there is something going on that used to be just beneath the surface, now it is starting to bubble up in the most unlikely places. It has caught a lot of us completely off guard. That is how we have gotten to this place we are today. Not quite sure how to respond, how we should react. Well at least in public. Conservatives have told us that we play the race card, that we only dislike Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain because they refuse to be victims. Sometimes you hear something enough and you start to see a little truth in it. But today I call BS! B.S.!!! When a sitting Congressmen (White) calls our President (Black) a tar baby. I say, you sir are a racist A** that does not deserve the use of the word sir. You deserve to be kicked unceremonisly out of office and run back into the hole from which you crawled. Not sure what bothers me more at this point that he said it ir that there seems to be not outrage that he said it. CNN had it in a blog, it was hard to uncover it anywhere. He said it on a radio program and not even the host said well maybe that is a little too far. B.S.!
As a Black woman it sometimes makes me laugh (others my heart is just heavy) to see the knots people tie themselves into trying to not to call someone a racist because, yes, it is a very offensive term. But in truth it applied to Joe Wilson, but instead he was rewarded with 2 million in campaign contributions. It applied to the Los Alamitos, California mayor Dean Grose with the watermelons on the white house lawn email, but he was just being funny and meant no harm, after all he apologized. Oh and lets not forget the SCGOP, (South Carolina again!), activist and former state Senate candidate Rusty DePass who said an escaped gorilla was one of First Lady Michelle Obama’s ancestors. He too apologized, it was a joke people!! No harm no foul. Right now I am pretty darn tired of hearing I’m sorry. After a while you start to feel like the battered wife who gets her butt kicked every Friday and an apology every Monday. It loses a little something after a while. I ask my White counterparts when do we say it? Do we wait for them to actually say the N word? When do you step up and say okay, you are an A** and a racist one at that. There has to be the line that a person cannot cross. Maybe I draw mine a little further up than you do but where is yours? Because try as I might I cannot find ANY other use of the words tar baby but to call a Black person less than, not good enough, beneath, inferior and any other term you can find. My family will tell you I am pretty sensitive. Growing up I was the crybaby of my family. But, today even they would agree, this is B.S!! And I’m calling every decent American on it!
