[GCFL-discuss] Jackson on Parks

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

Didn't the press make up the RED states and Blue states just for something to write about ??

Dave
  ----- Subject: [GCFL-discuss] Jackson on Parks


  There must be something interesting we can talk about. I doubt if Time magazine is going to print this letter, so maybe I should toss it out here for dissection. (It is a response to Jesse Jackson's shamelessly opportunistic "Appreciation" of Rosa Parks, which Time for some unfathomable reason asked him to write). I must admit, I cannot remember a time I have ever had any respect for Jackson. 

  Siarlys


  It is unfortunate that you chose Jesse Jackson to write your Appreciation of Rosa Parks. He has diluted, rather than extolled, her sterling accomplishments, with irrelevant political rhetoric. Perhaps most glaring is his use of the 21st century cliche "red states" to refer to the former confederate states who had laws explicitly segregating public life by race. At the time Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, anyone who heard a state described as "red" would have understood that a majority of the state's voters supported the Communist Party in the last election.  No state from the short-lived Confederacy would have given a majority of its votes to Republicans. Nor are states of the old South uniformly "red" today, nor "red" states confined to those that once had segregation laws. In states now stereotyped as "blue," there was no shortage of restaurants and hotels where staff nervously said "We don't serve Negroes here." (When I was a child, there was a joke about a man of dark complexion who calmly replied "That's good, I don't want to eat one, bring me some fried chicken.")

  Mrs. Parks took her stand within a legacy that stretched back through Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois, not merely a spark out of nowhere that ignited a mere nine years of progress. On the other hand, she was hardly THE inspiration for the 100 year struggle of the African National Congress, which began before she was born. There is a huge difference between a native African majority fighting for freedom from an immigrant "white" minority regime, and a stereotyped minority fighting for freedom from laws favoring a "white" majority. Don't even try to compare Tienanmen Square. While both Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were important, the 1964 law had little to do with enforcing school integration, and the Brown case had nothing to do with jobs, housing, restaurants, trains, buses, or much of anything outside of schools. Rosa Parks was never driven by any political agenda? Her whole life was a political agenda, in the finest sense of the word.


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