Andrew M. Manis, author of Macon Black and White steering committee member of Macon’s Center for Racial understanding, wrote the following op-ed:For much of the last forty years, ever since America “fixed” its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, “When are African Americans finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask: “When are we White Americans going to get over our ridiculous obsession with skin color?
Recent reports that “Election Spurs Hundreds’ of Race Threats, Crimes” should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in “Bombingham,” Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than “talk the talk.”
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.
We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent. Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes. Call for their impeachment, perhaps.
But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we’re back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we’ve proven what conservatives are always saying -that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president. But instead we now hear that schoolchildren from Maine to California are talking about wanting to “assassinate Obama.”
Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, “How long?” How long before we white people realize we can’t make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us? How long until we white people can -once and for all- get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color? How long until we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us superior? How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin? How long until we white people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners? How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
How long before we starting “living out the true meaning” of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that “red and yellow, black and white” all are precious in God’s sight?
Until this past November 4, I didn’t believe this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don’t believe I’ll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem. But here’s my three-point plan:
First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black Slaves Built I’m going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family from us white people.
Second, I’m going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about President Obama.
Third, I’m going to pray to live long enough to see America surprise the world once again, when white people can “in spirit and in truth” sing of our damnable color prejudice, “We HAVE overcome.”
Andrew Manis is author of Macon Black and White and serves on the steering committee of Macon’s Center for Racial understanding.
It take a Village to protect our President!!! From Wikipedia:
Andrew Michael Manis is a historian, author, and professor at Macon State College, in Macon, Georgia.
An ordained Baptist minister, Manis was educated at Samford University (B.A. in Religion and History) and at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he earned a Master of Divinity and a Ph.D. in American Church History in 1984. He also studied briefly at the University of Chicago Divinity School. From 1985 to 1988, he was the first Protestant scholar to teach in the Theology Department at Xavier University of (New Orleans) Louisiana, and prior to teaching at Macon State College, he taught at Averett University in Danville, Virginia.
Dr. Andrew Manis is an award-winning historian whose research focuses on the role of religion in American life, with particular attention placed on the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Manis recently received the Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council for his book, A Fire You Can't Put Out.[1] The book, a biography of civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, was also nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Prize. Dr. Manis is a popular speaker, addressing churches and schools on the role of the church in crusading for social and political justice. Dr. Manis organized an on-campus event at which Rev. Shuttlesworth spoke, drawing record attendance. Dr. Manis has appeared on C-SPAN and the History Channel as well as Fox News.[2]
Dr. Manis has recently been selected as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence. He will spend four months in 2009 teaching and researching at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.[3]
Other Publications:
-Macon Black and White: An Unutterable Separation in the American Century. Macon: Mercer University Press/Tubman African American Museum, 2004. -- Winner of the 2005 Georgia Author of the Year Award (History Division) -- National Semifinalist for the 2005 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
-Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars. Mercer University Press, 2002. [Revised and expanded edition of my 1987 book; see below]
-Birmingham Revolutionaries: Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Contributor and Co-editor with Marjorie White. Mercer University Press, 2000.
-A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. University of Alabama Press, 1999. -- Winner of the 2000 Lillian Smith Book Award—Winner of the 2001 James F. Sulzby Prize, Alabama Historical Association, 2001, for best book on Alabama history published in 1999-2000—Winner of the 1998 James McMillan Prize, University of Alabama Press, for best manuscript submitted in 1998.
-Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Black and White Baptists and Civil Rights, 1947-1957. University of Georgia Press, 1987.
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