People of Good Will

There is little doubt that the three front-runners - Republican and Democratic - in the American presidential primaries are all people of good will. Individuals all, who recognize the primary importance of reconciling black and white in America. Traditional adversarial positions no longer suffice in the world of today, where most U.S. citizens recognize injustice and racial discrimination as the human-rights scourge it is.

A minority of both colours still practise their own brands of discrimination, but carefully, for the most part. The majority of Americans will no longer permit themselves to be an integral part of disowning the humanity of the other. Christian Heritage advocates, those social defenders of white superiority and supremacy are a despised minority. The feared and hated Ku Klux Klan now a bitter memory for most, ashamed of the unspeakable past.

On the other hand, from within the Black community, not surprisingly, there has arisen a counterpart to both those unsavoury groups. Blacks, no longer disenfranchised, assert their rights as never before. Although many might be surprised at the knowledge that after Emancipation, Blacks asserted themselves in white society with the self-assurance of the societally accepted.

That brief interregnum succumbed to full-fledged racism victimizing generations of Blacks in white society, placing them at a disadvantage in opportunities for advancement, in the workplace, in social settings, in legal matters and leaving them vulnerable to the dreadful incidences of racist predations, imperilling their status in society, leaving them open to casual murder unredressed by the law.

Wouldn't it be inevitable that an underground system of self-protection, violent demands and revenge might be established in response? That a slow but steady reversal of Black self perception be embarked upon, leading to Black Pride and a disavowal of white-imposed inferiority? Wasn't it inevitable that someone of the moral stature of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., might take inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi?

Isn't it sad beyond words that the Reverend King's success would lead to his assassination, and that it ultimately would lead to the accession of self-serving successors of the ilk of Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend James Meeks - and oh yes, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright...?

All of them out-clanning Whitey.