ulitave

We - Negroes, coloreds, slaves, blacks, African Americans - have long been the trump deck of America. We're secretly quite proud of this heritage. Without us, the Colonies would never have established an economic base. America would never have torn herself apart in civil strife, except over us. Then there's sports - once we were banned and excluded (unless we learned Spanish and claimed to be Cubans.) Then we started infiltrating major leagues and winning handily. Football, baseball, basketball, boxing. We won the right to vote and politicians began courting the black vote en masse. In some locations, we could swing elections. Our stories and histories became better-known and taught in schools. This is where things went wrong.

I remember Bill Clinton at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, sitting for a photo op. He was in church. He was in a black church, in front of a black choir. Bill was often surrounded by members of the black clergy. It carried a loud but unspoken message to many people - if this historically oppressed group can trust me, you can too.

I've seen similar arguments most of my life. They irk me. They irk me. Here's the problem - when someone's argument is flawed or weak, they can pull us out as their trump card. Say it: Ace of Spades. they hope that the collective guilt over what happened to us will end all argument. This once worked, I believe, but now it really doesn't.

A recent example is the LJ tempest over breastfeeding icons. The originator compared the restriction to a theoretical prohibition on black faces in icons.

"I wonder how they'd react to LJ saying "you can't show a black person in your default icon, but you can show a black person in your non-default icon, so you should just be happy with that and do it." It's just as illegal to discriminate against breastfeeding mothers as it is to discriminate against someone for their race."

I'm not here to discuss the originator's argument. What I do want to do is applaud people like phaedrasdream and garrity, who argued their points without using my people's history as a moral guilt-enhancer.

Our days as America's morality play are coming to a close. This (I was about to say "I believe", but I'd come off like that pompous NPR spot) is probably why so many of the older black generation resists Mexican immigration. America's moral barometer is shifting from the lunch counter to the border crossing. Many older blacks never became citizens, not in their hearts. They may fear a loss of place as America's special people, and isolated deaths that count nowhere.