Whatta ya think, Copernicus?  Is your hero, Abe Lincoln, a white supremacist?

Whatta ya think, Copernicus?  Is your hero, Abe Lincoln, a white supremacist?

At what stage of his life?  As a child, I was a racist.  As an adolescent in the 1960s, I came to understand the nature of racism a lot better than most younger folks do today.  I can remember when apartheid was alive and well in the US, and not just in the South.  Teaching a Higher Education Opportunity Program class at Ohio State in the early 70s really changed me.  I read Malcom X's autobiography--a great consciousness raiser--and I learned a lot from the students.  It made me really begin to understand what it was like to see America through the eyes of Blacks.

Lincoln was an utterly amazing individual.  I can't think of many human beings that I don't admire more, and that isn't because he always believed the right things or did the right things.  It was because he transformed his party, his country, and himself in ways that are almost impossible to imagine today.

Lincoln was never as pro-slavery as, say, Mark Twain was, but he did believe that African Americans were inferior to whites.  As a politician in Illinois he did not believe that the Northern Black Laws (equivalent to the Southern Jim Crow laws in the 20th century) should be repealed.  He did not favor allowing them the vote, the right to hold public office, or other privileges that full citizens had.  He also felt that the best solution would be to send them back to Africa, to separate them from whites.  Most abolitionists saw him as horribly weak on the race issue, if not outright pro-slavery.  Nevertheless, his election triggered the Civil War, because he had sided too many times in public with the abolitionists, and his party was largely pro-abolition.

During his early administration, Lincoln was severely attacked for suggesting that slavery be ended and the slaves be sent back to Africa.  This did not go over well with free Blacks, and Frederick Douglass criticized him often.  However, that changed as the war progressed, and Lincoln was eventually convinced that his earlier views were wrong.  He wrote the Emancipation Proclamation well before he released it publicly, keeping it for an opportune moment.  He feared reaction in the slave states of Tennessee and Maryland, which were part of the Union.  However, he eventually became convinced that the only way to win the war was by recruiting Black soldiers into the army.  He did that, and they became the bulwark of the Northern armed forces.  Before Lincoln died, he had done much to reverse his earlier opinions about race, and Frederick Douglass became a good friend who proclaimed that Lincoln treated him more like an equal than any of the white abolitionists ever had.  That was Lincoln's great talent--his ability to unite, win enemies over, and change his thinking.  It was a very tragic day for the defeated South when he was assassinated, because he opposed the harsh penalties that were imposed after his death.  Lincoln would have reunited the country more quickly, and America would have been better for it.

Should we have an MLK holiday?  You bet.  Martin Luther King was one of the most brilliant, inspiring civil leaders of the 20th century.

And I should add that I am an Obama supporter today because I see something of Lincoln and Kennedy in his intellect and his demeanor.  I think that he has the best chance to truly unite the country and repair our damaged image around the world.  However, he is inexperienced and he has rough edges.  Nevertheless, he is currently my favorite Democratic candidate.

i hope, along with Copernicus, that America will soon have a president who clearly benefits from the diverse backgrounds which produced him.  Although the media prejudicially refer to Obama as 'black', he is of course mixed.  The assumption which underlies labelling him that way is in itself racist, but people seem not to notice this.

Back in the days when the laws were helping to ensure our racial purity, Obama would have been called a mulatto.  (Mexicans and Indians of mixed descent were half-breeds.)  When I taught my HEOP class at Ohio State, we talked a lot about race, and my students gave me the formula for declaring whether one was officially white.  I don't recall it now, but one was declared officially black if there was more than 20% African blood in your ancestry or something to that effect. 

It had been more important in the 1960s, when public facilities were racially segregated.  When I was about 11 years old, a schoolmate got up to tell the class how he had spent his summer vacation.  He had traveled to Florida with his family.  Unfortunately, he was one of those caucasians who got a deep tan if he stayed in the sun too long, so he was kicked out of a public swimming pool.  Of course, his classmates, being wholesome white kids in America in the 1950s, immediately began calling him racial names and making fun of him.

PS - hi Cop, how're you doing?  Remind me - do i owe you a drink or do you owe me one?    i know that Johnny owes me one.

So, you are relying on me to do the bookkeeping?  Hmm.  I seem to recall that you owe me then next drink, and don't forget that 500 quid that you were going to pay me back.  I distinctly remember that it was not American money.  So don't try anything funny with exchange rates.  Tell you what.  Forget the beer.  Let's just say we're even on the drink side.  I'll just settle for the money. 

PS - hi Cop, how're you doing?  Remind me - do i owe you a drink or do you owe me one?  Very Happy  i know that Johnny owes me one.

Hey!  You just fly your butt over here and I'll set you up proper!

heh

Why does The Blade pander to blacks? Why have such an ignorant headline, "Toledo's blacks told to vote down .75% tax renewal" when The Blade certainly would never report Toledo's whites told to vote this or that way, as if we were a single mindless voting block?

The Blade panders to blacks