Well Now it is Done

Well, Now it is Done!!

Back in the early fifties, Idaho State University had a boxing team, and it was, bar none, the best overall boxing team in the nation.  One of the boxers from the team, a handsome, tall black man went on to the Olympics where he beat a favored Swedish boxer for the heavyweight Olympic crown.  When he returned from the Olympics a big celebration was set up in Pocatello, Idaho to welcome Ed back and let him know how proud we all were for him.   The complication arose when the banquet for the celebration was scheduled at the Bannock Hotel, and, after the schedule was already established, the hotel let the organizing committee know that they really couldn’t serve Ed in the main dining room.  He was, after all, a “negro”.  This was in Pocatello, Idaho, not somewhere in Alabama, and the sh** hit the fan.  

I was so embarrassed.  A fair number of the guys I had played football with were black (actually, colored was then the preferred term, having replaced “negro” years before).  A number of high school and college students protested, picketing the hotel, the letters to the Editor of the Idaho State Journal (it may have still been the Pocatello Tribune then) were blistering.  I don’t actually remember the final result, but I vaguely remember that the banquet was held and Ed attended, but I am not sure.  I was ashamed of my city, and of  some of my friends, and even, for some ridiculous reason, of my self.  My emotions at that time led me to join the NAACP (which was almost totally white folks, most of them Jewish, at that time).   I didn’t participate much in the organization except to contribute a little money and attend two or three meetings, but I couldn’t help still being ashamed that people I knew could feel so negative (and still praise the guy and cheer) about someone’s color.

I’m embarrassed right now.  I know that some really fine people felt really threatened by the Dubai Ports business, but, after all is said and done, all this uproar was not about substantial evidence or threat, it was (in my opinion) hysteria relating to skin color and nationality and religion. (I know, I read Michele Malkin and the other right wing and left wing columnists—this time in agreement with each other and I couldn’t believe a word of it.)  

I hope that it will blow over, but if I were Muslim, living in the United States, or in any of the Arab countries which have supported us for the past few years, I would be humiliated, angry, and probably ready to join something or someone to try to validate the fact that a great injustice had been done to people who were of my faith, and who looked like me, just because of group hysteria.  I hope this doesn’t have the kind of result I fear, but I do fear, that in the next two or three years we will see results of what happened today that are far more frightening than any result of a port facility run by an Arab company (with an American CEO) could ever have been.  I think that we have proved that we have a raghead Islamophobic  flood running though this nation, just as we had a “four eyed Jap, and kill the Nazi flood when I was a child. And I fear that resolving this will be almost as painful as resolving the results of Jim Crow laws, and so-called separate but equal fictions in schools and employment regarding another group with another skin color.  I pray that I am wrong.