IT'S A SIGN of these sorry political times that this subject even has to be broached, but isn't it time we defended white people?
Before you cavalierly pooh-pooh the notion, consider the publication of Race Traitor, a journal dedicated to the proposition that the white race needs to be abolished and uses the invidious but nonetheless catchy slogan "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, of Harvard University and New York University, respectively, are two white guys who started Race Traitor in 1992.
"Oh, my goodness," said Elyzabeth-Anne Marcussen when she learned of the journal's existence. Marcussen is a Pasadena woman who recently moved to Maryland with her husband and two daughters.
She got her first taste of white-bashing when her 7- year-old came home from school and gave the highlights of her second-grade social studies lesson on the Rev.. Martin Luther King Jr. The innocent lass - the civil rights leader was "Martin King Junior Luther, who wasn't a sick-people doctor" in her previously unbesmirched mind - was going along swimmingly for a bit, telling her mom where King was born and how he graduated from seminary school and became a pastor. Then came the part about the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott.
"Now her story is peppered with `the white people were against it' and `the white people burned crosses in their yards' and on and on," Marcussen, a homemaker and radio ad-writer, wrote in an online site called EAForums. Seeing that frequent negative references to whites were stressing her daughter out, Marcussen decided some motherly intervention was in order. "I don't think that's what your teachers meant to convey," Marcussen told her.
Then, as simply as she could explain it to a 7-year-old mind, Marcussen showed her daughter the error of blanket statements like "the white people did this or that." Marcussen told her daughter that both of them were white and didn't make black people sit in the back of buses or burn crosses on their lawns or make them drink from separate water fountains.
"Ignorant people did that," Marcussen told her. "Ignorant people are people who don't know any better AND don't care if they ever learn."
"What about the white people who killed King Martin Junior Luther?" the girl asked. "That was one man," her mom answered, "an evil, ignorant, cowardly man. He just happened to be white. I just don't want you to think that you are bad because you are white. And it seems to me that your teachers don't realize they're making you think all white people were out to hurt black people."
