Eric Holder, the Attorney General-designate of the Obama Administration is drawing a lot of fire from Republicans. They are trying to bluff and bluster, in order not to appear patsies to the mandate of the President-elect and the Democratic majority in Congress. One of the “issues” they are going to try to get him on is his role in the Elian Gonzalez case.
Elian Gonzalez was a young Cuban boy who left Cuba with his mother in a boat trying to escape Fidel Castro’s regime. His mother, though, died on the journey, and he was picked up by the US Coast Guard, and brought to his mother’s family in Florida. When all this came to light, his father, still in Cuba, asked that he be returned. After months of very public grandstanding and pleas from entertainment and political figures, the US government raided his mother’s family’s home, and pulled the crying youngster from his mother’s family at gunpoint. The Senate Republicans want to know “exactly what Mr. Holder’s role in the affair was in his capacity as the Assistant Attorney General.”
I firmly believed then, as I do now, that Elian should have been returned to his father without any qualms, and that the United States government should not have been beholden to a group of wealthy ex-patriots who were trying to prove a political point instead of worrying about what was best for Elian. That being said, I began to wonder what else I would have blogged about, had blogging been around at the time.
Here’s my list:
1. The fall of apartheid in South Africa
2. The Tienamen Square Uprisings and suppression
3. The Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984
4. The election of Bill Clinton (my first presidential election as a voter)
5. The persecution of President Clinton
6. The real reason he should have been impeached
7. Tupac, Biggie and the real meaning of assassination
At this point, blogging was around, but I wasn’t doing it!
8. Bush v. Gore and the Supreme Court
9. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers
10. The invasion of Iraq
11. John Kerry and John Edwards? Seriously?
12. The recall of Gray Davis in California
13. Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
14. Rodney King, OJ Simpson and Reginald Denny
This list was just off the top of my head, and I was staying in the frame of time I have been walking the earth and aware of the outside world. Otherwise, I would have blogged about Jefferson and Hemmings, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s “Show me the spot!” speech, and Plessy v. Ferguson, too.
Since you’re here, what would you have blogged about?
I am new to the world of blogging; in fact, this is my first blog response (yay for me!). I’m still trying to grasp the tremendous power of blogging and all the information and misinformation that people must sift through in order to glean some sort of ‘truth’ or rhyme and reason of it all.
If I could have blogged, say 100 years ago til now, I would have blogged about the economic impact of slavery (the exponential growth of white wealth and the exponential decline of wealth and opportunity of black people). I would have also blogged about the intrinsic skills of white and black people, identifying white people’s propensity for order, structure and systems; while at the same time, contrasting it with Black people’s propensity for creativity and adaptability. Perhaps my biggest goal, through the art of blogging, would have been to invite all people of color to ‘post’ or respond to the call to ‘Create a Better Future’. In this, I would have blogged scenarios of our future and what would have happened had certain events not taken place. For example, what if Emmit Till had smiled at the white lady and she had simply smiled back rather than taking offense and telling the racist white men when ultimately killed him. Would he have grown up to be a doctor or scientist and found the cure for cancer or created a business that employed hundreds of people? What would have been…what COULD have been? And secondly, what if we could create a world through words, where there were no more gangs- bloods and crips. Better yet, what if bloods and crips DID exist, but were under the tutelage of the Talented Tenth in their communities, thereby creating security for the young and elderly and using their ‘influence’ to ensure that black-owned businesses were ‘patronized’ in their communities. What if the gangs who CLAIMED certain streets…actually OWNED the properties on those streets?
These are the types of blogs I would have written and I would have been interested to read the feedback and see if a dialogue of words– blogging–could in fact evolve into the changing of thoughts, which create the change of actions, which result in the changing of lives.
Blog on my brutha….blog on.
LB-
My only question would be: are there “intrinsic skills of white and black people”? While I understand your starting point, those types of statements, ideas, notions – that a particular group of people have a particular set of skills simply because they are black, white, male, female, latino, asian, short, skinny, disabled, non-disabled – are part of what has held us back as a community, as a country, as a world. Within the framework of the United States, there are definite patterns of group action based on necessity, or avarice, or apathy, but I don’t hold with intrinsic skills.
ReyMac