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Friday’s Weekend Column
About a Minnesota Man Exploring Life in the South I Saw The Face Of Southern Racism, and It Wasn't White
Last week, Wanda and I were invited to a banquet that was given to raise money for the Woman's Pregnancy Center here in Madison, Florida. It seemed like a good cause to me. I didn't know a lot about the center, but was told it was a place pregnant women could come and get counseling about keeping their baby, and even receive the financial support and child care education they would need to be successful mothers. All of that seemed good to me. To be honest, I'm a guy, so I don't understand what it is like to have a living person inside of me, and I never will. However I am a parent, and I do know the joy I have experienced from the love I have shared with my children. That love is something special and the bond between mother and child must be even stronger than that between father and child. I don't know for sure, but that is what I believe. So, Wanda and I went to the banquet thinking this is a good thing for our community and we should support it. At least for me, I didn't leave there feeling the same. I read an article in the local paper about this same banquet, but I didn't recognize that the writer had been to the same banquet I had been to. What the writer left out of their article was the word of the night for me, and that word was GENOCIDE. You see, the main speaker of the night was Dr. Clenard Childress, of Montclair, New Jersey. Dr Childress' web page is www.blackgenocide.org. That was mentioned in the paper, but nothing about how Dr. Childress believes that the United States Supreme Court passed Roe vs. Wade, making abortion legal in the United States back in 1973 to get rid of black babies. The whole theme of his talk was about black genocide, and he used the following quote by Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg as proof:
That was a powerful argument, but Dr Childress left out part of the quote. You see, Justice Ginsberg thought Roe vs. Wade was about population control of minority races when it was passed, but later on she realized she was wrong. Dr Childress never said anything about that. Here is the quotation from her:
In 1973, when Roe vs. Wade was decided, Justice Ginsberg was a teacher at Columbia Law School, and she thought abortion was going to be used by the state to control the population of minority groups, but when the Supreme Court ruled in 1977 and again in 1980, that tax funds could not be used for abortions, Ginsberg said, "I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong." Now back to that banquet. Dr Childress used the first part of Justice Ginsberg's quote to prove his point about government genocide of African American babies, but failed to tell us that Ginsberg was not a Supreme Court Justice when Wade was passed nor that she admitted that she was wrong about her original thoughts. Childress then went on to talk about how 7,100 black American soldiers were killed in the Vietnam war, and he used multiple quotations from Dr. Martin Luther King to make his point that there was a disproportionate number of black soldiers killed in that war, another part of his black genocide theory. Over 58,000 American troops were killed in Vietnam, and if you look at population figures for that time (which I did when writing this), 7,100 black Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen dieing is not out of line numerically. It almost seems a disservice to their memories to try and say they were killed by our government in some strange genocide of black America. But Dr. Childress was not the only person pushing this black genocide theory. Barb Shackelford, the Executive Director of the Tallahassee Woman's Pregnancy Center, gave a talk and pushed this black genocide theme also. She showed us a few minutes of a two hour documentary about black genocide called Maafa 21. Here is how it is described on the internet:
Ms Shackelford praised this documentary and offered to give a copy to anyone who wanted to watch it. Now to tell you the truth, this was the first time in my life I had ever heard about our government in Washington trying to exterminate the black race from America, and it was a shock. I didn't jump up and shout, "That is a lie" but that is what I thought. When I got home I started reading up on black genocide, and there is a reason I never heard about it. It is pretty much a secret except in black pro-life circles. I found no news articles about it from recognized news groups, and then I found the whole quotation from Justice Ginsberg. I don't like it when speakers play games with quotation, using only the part that proves their point. That is dishonest. We have race problems here in America, and we should all be working on them, but when the potential financial backers of a multi-race Woman's Pregnancy Center are told a theory that Washington and white America is out to kill the black babies those people want to save, we are not helping that race problem at all. I was going to post this on Friday but thought I better think about it over the weekend and see if it still read the way I wanted. Racism is a touchy subject, and people will brand you as one for even thinking about it. The thing that makes me think this whole American government genocide charge by Reverend Childress is not true is the that I could find nothing in support of his theory by the Congressional Black Caucus, NAACP, or the Urban League. You would think these groups would jump into this with both feet if there were any truth to this allegation. Not even Rev. Al Sharpton nor the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan have anything to say about it. Another reason I still feel I should print this, is that Rev. Childress is a speaker who travels the United States talking about how our government is trying to kill every black American. Every time Childress speaks at a fund raiser for a pregnancy center, the pregnancy counselors who deal with the young women who are their clients are exposed to this line of thinking. You can't tell me that this genocide theory never makes it into counseling sessions. I learned at the banquet that most pregnancy counselors are white, and then you have white American women, like Barb Shackelford, the Executive Director of the Tallahassee Pregency Center passing on this story of Black genocide to young black women. I must say again, I do not believe that our government in Washington has a plan and is implementing that plan to kill every black American. I don't buy it, but many have drunk that Kool Aid. Call me crazy, call me uninformed, heck you can call me delusional if you want, but I do not believe there is a systematic plan by our white government in Washington, a government led by a black American, to wipe out the black race. |
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