"FROM CHALK TO CHARCOAL"

OR

From "Colored" to "African-American"

Talking heads in the media say we need to "have a serious dialog on race in this country".  So far, only a few white commentators have discussed this topic; usually with other whites.  I contend, especially after the Trayvon Martin incident, that it is more important that a serious conversation take place between persons of all colors; but especially among the various shades of non-whites.  It would, at a minimum, make it more difficult for the white right to pit us against each other.  Non-white/non-white dialog will be difficult to achieve because whites in the media hog the megaphone and call the shots behind the scenes to limit the scope and direction of race dialog.  Their presence is detectable, even in what non-whites can say in the media.

Thanks to technology, those of us over 70 can record our experiences and leave them behind in the minds of younger generations.  When I was born, my birth certificate read "Negro" for race.  This was years before Dick Nixon forced his  five OMB boxes on the American people to divide us racially.  Because segregation forced us together despite skin shade, we existed in a group (even as  a community) that claimed membership of every non-white; "from chalk to charcoal" regardless of skin shade.  That no longer exists.  It is a serious mistake to think this nation is somehow "post-racial" or "post-blackness".

In the days of forced segregation under custom and law; at federal, state, and local levels (1867-1954); it was the government that held non-whites in a condition of economic, social, political and legal Hell.  This legal status was necessary to enforce the Peonage systems that re-enslaved portions of the U.S. citizenry.  This period in our history began with President Rutherford B. Hayes (one of the notorious Ohio presidents) who brought on the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of the KKK,  Jim Crow, Peonage, Lynching, and Segregation.  Presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt were activist supporters of this dismal phase in our history.  Not until President Theodore Roosevelt did serious steps to end Peonage take place.

My time as an officer in the military (1962-1982) included a period of intense racial strife in the U.S. services.  I met many service members from every part of the country; although the military membership was, and still is, biased toward the deep south.  My most memorable conversations took place with white ethnics who explained how their groups progressed economically and socially and wondered why Blacks, Natives, and Hispanics did not follow the path that white ethnics took to improve their conditions.  Black service-members were unified in their view of race relations in the military in terms of white/non-white relations; but there was much less agreement as to genuine non-white/non-white relations.  "Crabs in a bucket" was the phrase most often heard then.

Integration laws and policies, which entered our history with Harry Truman's edict to integrate the military in 1948, were the water-shed that abruptly separated attitudes about skin color within the non-white groups in this country.  The "consensus" that existed prior to integration disappeared following the riots in the late 1960's. 

Lee Atwater and Karl Rove took over this phenomenon and demonstrated the economic and political power of playing on the racial tensions within and between the races in the United States.  What we have now is a political party hell-bent on using the confusions on race to ensure the continuation of southern-white-male control of public dialog.  Fox News has found it to be a gold mine.

Perhaps the Internet provides the only media channel that can be used to start race dialogs - in all directions.

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