Watch Out For Terrorists Within
Two Neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested yesterday in a plot uncovered by The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms uncovered to assassinate Barack Obama and kill 88 blacks students in Tennessee.
This is just the beginning.
I was asked recently by a very prominent attorney what did I think would happen after Obama won. I told him there would be a rise in overt racism in this country, perhaps the beginnings of a race war
While many are focusing on the economy or perhaps an assault by terrorists from another country, history tells me we have to check the terrorists within.
This plot is a sign. There have been many more. During McCain campaign rallies there have been shouts of "kill him!" and "off with his head!" referring to Obama. There have been references to "fried chicken and watermelon" and there was even a McCain "volunteer" from Pennsylvania who claimed that a 6-foot-4 black man assaulted her outside of an ATM, fondling her breasts and carving a B for Barack into her cheek.
It turned out to be a hoax (I knew it was when I heard it...but we can discuss that later). But there's history here. Susan Smith accused a black man of carjacking her and stealing her two kids. We later found out that she drowned her own children in a South Carolina lake. In 1989 in Boston, Charles Stuart sent police on a statewide chase of a black who he claimed stopped them at a light, demanded money and then shot his pregnant wife in the stomach. We later found out he had his own pregnant wife and unborn child killed.
When the going gets tough, history shows us that white folks will use black folks as scapegoats. And worse.
In Texas, just last month a 24-year-old Texas man, Brandon McClelland, was going on a beer run across the state line into Oklahoma when he was hit and run over by a truck and dragged for 70 feet under the truck, his body parts shredded along the way. One of the attackers is part of a white supremacist group.
(Read the whole story here: http://news.aol.com/article/texas-death-raises-racial-tension/225174)
It was shades of a similar case in Texas where another black man, James Byrd, was dragged behind a pickup truck by a gang of white supremacists until his torso came off.
I believe we have a very short memory. If we fail to remember our history, we are doomed to repeat it.
It was not so long ago-less than 50 years ago-when blacks were forced to sit on the back of buses, couldn't vote, couldn't go to schools alongside whites, couldn't eat at lunch counters and were relegates to second-class citizenship. When blacks fought for equality, there was a reign of terror unleashed on them that included lynches, burnings alive, castrations, bombings of churches with little girls inside, and a host of horrific acts.
I have a book that displays the lynchings of the 1940s, 50s and 60s and in these pictures you see white folks with their children on their shoulders, pointing and smiling. It's chilling to think that human beings would bring their children to witness such horrific acts and do so with glee, sending post cards with pieces of the remains of the victims attached.
But it happened. And as we come upon the possible historic event of a black man taking the highest office in the land, we must be careful, watchful and vigilant to not let a few evil, hateful, ignorant beings ruin the possibility and the hope of what American can be.
United we stand. But the other part of that is real: Divided we fall. Just as those planes didn't distinguish white from black, Republican from Democrat, rich from poor on September 11th, nor with the next terrorist attack or this current economic crisis choose sides.
We better wake up and realize that!
