Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [33]
For once I’d love to see a black person in the seat next to me at a Knicks game—or within twenty rows of me in any direction (players and Spike Lee excluded). For once I’d like to walk onto an airplane and see it filled with only black passengers instead of a bunch of complaining white jerks who feel a sense of entitlement in demanding that I give up my lap so they can put their seat in it.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a self-hating Caucasian. It’s not the white skin color of others that gives me the creeps. What galls me is that my fellow white people have become so conniving they’ve figured out a way to turn black people into white people! When I first heard Clarence Thomas speak I thought, “For crying out loud, don’t white people have enough people already?” Now the airwaves are filled with blacks who are trotted out to push the white agenda. I am stumped as to where the networks dig these individuals up. They speak out against affirmative action, even though many of them got into college thanks to affirmative action. They blast welfare mothers, even though that’s who their own mother was, struggling for years in poverty so her son could grow up to debase her and her kind. They speak out against homosexuals, even though AIDS has devastated black gay men more than any other group. They despise Jesse Jackson, even though he spent years being arrested and risking his life so they would have the freedom to sit down in any restaurant and order lunch, let alone voice any opinion they wished. I’m not saying that black America must speak with one political voice; I’m just repulsed by the venom some of these “conservatives” spew.
It’s the saddest thing to watch, this Uncle Tom porn. How much are these freaks being paid? I wonder, when the red fight on the camera goes off, does Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews or Tucke r Carlson ever say to these sellouts, “Hey, there’s a house next to mine for sale—you oughta move in!” or “Hey, my sister’s single now, and so are you—how ‘bout it?” I don’t know, maybe they do. Maybe O’Reilly will have me over for Kwanzaa this December.
I wonder how long we’ll have to live with the legacy of slavery. That’s right. I brought it up. SLAVERY. You can almost hear the groans of white America whenever you bring up the fact that we still suffer from the impact of a government-approved and supported slave system.
Well, I’m sorry, but the roots of most of our social ills can be traced straight back to this sick chapter of our history. African Americans never got a chance to have the same fair start the rest of us got. Their families were willfully destroyed. Their language and culture and religion were stripped from them. Their poverty was institutionalized so that our cotton could get picked, our wars could be fought, our convenience stores could remain open all night. The America we’ve come to know would never have come to pass if not for the millions of slaves who built it and created its booming economy—and for the millions of their descendants who do the same dirty work for whites today.
“Mike, Why are you bringing up slavery? No black person living today was ever a slave. I didn’t enslave anyone. Why don’t you quit blaming all this on some past injustice, and make them take responsibility for their own actions?”
Well, it’s not like we’re talking ancient Rome here, folks. My grandfather was born just three years after the Civil War.
That’s right, my grandfather. My great-uncle was born before the Civil War. And I’m only in my forties. Sure, people in my family seem to marry late and have their babies even later, but the truth remains: I’m just two generations from slave times. That, my friends, is NOT a “long time ago.” In the vast breadth of human history, it was only yesterday.