My View on the Whole Racism Thing

My parents raised me to think for myself. They raised me to use my own head and not other's for making decisions. Come to think of it, my whole family is like that and because we think for ourselves, other people hate us. They "look down their noses" at us. They think we're trying to be better than they are...which of course we're not. We're just not stooping down to their standards.

I look at my church for example. You'd think that since it's a church, all the people there would be on one accord and help everyone out who has less than them right?...WRONG! The people at my church are so caught up in they're materialistic needs that they completely forget about what their main purpose of being there is...to serve and worship God.

The First Lady (Pastor's wife) of my church is such a hypocrite. She says she's not racist but everytime she brings someone from her job to church, it's always "This is my white friend, so and so, ya'll" or "There is this new girl at work, and she's white by the way ya'll, so don't be alarmed". She's always doing crap like that. She puts herself before her congregation which first of all, makes her look terribly stupid and ignorant, and second of all, abuses all that she stands for in God's eyes. She completely abuses her power as First Lady, but that's really off the subject, so we won't get into that right now.

On the other hand, her husband is just like her. I was in Western Sizzilin the other day on the honor of my brother's last night here on leave from Iraq, and they were there. Of course, they acted like they didn't know us. Anywho...when the meal was over, my family and I went over to the Pastor's table and greeted them and what-not like that. You know, being courteous. They had gotten up to leave as well, so we walked out together. The Pastor pulled me aside after I asked him why he didn't leave a tip, and do you wanna know what his answer was? "We're not gonna leave that old white girl a tip! Those white people can't cook!" I swear I rounded on him before I knew it, but me being sixteen and him being sixty-something I had to remember my manners. Prior to his statement, I watched him gulf down his food and go back two or three times to the buffet to get more. If you ask me he was just putting on airs to try to impress my brother...who was clearly NOT impressed. In fact, I think my brother wanted to get him more than I did. He's lucky he doesn't have to deal with them on a weekly basis like we do.

The point that I'm getting at is, black people are really unappreciative of what they have. Like the First Lady, we completely abuse our rights. Yes we get more attention than any other race, but have we stopped to think that it's more NEGATIVE attention than POSITIVE attention?

Prime example: The N-word. Now we all know what the N-word is, so I'm not going to say it because I completely despise it. I even hate reading it in books because it portrays us as nothing...which we are far from even though we may act like it sometimes. Anyways back to the subject. A white person can call another white person a "C" (think about a food that you eat with soup...or peanut butter..because I'm not saying that one either. You'll just have to use your imagination on this one.), and it's ok. A black person can call another black person an "N", and that's ok too. Now...a black person can call a white person a "C", and that's perfectly fine, but if a white person calls a black person an "N" then that same black person is ready to take the white person's head off because of a racial slur. But didn't the black person make one first? Didn't he/she start it by calling the white person a "C"? And this is the part I don't get most of all...five minutes later after the black person is through telling the white person what he/she can and cannot do, that same black person calls one of his/her best friends an "N".
Now if you ask me, that totally defeats the purpose.

People at school always riducule me because most of my friends are white. Yea they're white...get over it. They always wanna know WHY I hang out with mostly white people. Well for one, I really didn't even notice that they were white until someone pointed it out to me, and two I've known them forever, and I've been friends with them forever. So I asked them to please explain to me why I'm going to stop being friends with someone after several years just because it's brought to my attention that they are white? They couldn't answer me. So I told them that when they could provide a valid answer for me to that question, I would stop hanging out with mostly white people and hang out with all black people...they haven't come back to me yet. That just goes to show that people favor tradition over change.

Let's explore "tradition over change" for a minute. Back when everyone had slaves, the entire nation was content, but then came along Abe Lincoln with his Emancipation Proclamation during (or was is after? I can't remember) the Civil War and freed the slaves in the South. Now the slaveowners went into an uproar because TRADITIONALLY when they said "jump" the slave said "how high?" and now this CHANGE said they couldn't do that anymore. The slaveowners were in a slump now because due to TRADITION they had slaves to do their work, but now that they were do to CHANGE they had to get out there and bust they're butts for themselves. They went crazy. Then we move to civil rights. Once again the nation was in an uproar because a black person wanted to eat at the same table as a white person. But once again, the white people weren't used to this CHANGE and because they didn't know how to cope with it, they rebelled which was the only TRADITIONAL thing they knew how to do. It worked for a while, but it was brought under control.

Nowadays, a black person can call a white person on just about anything they want to and win. Like I said before, we completely abuse our rights. We even have a whole month dedicated to our rights and the leaders who helped achieve them, and that's all well and good except when it rolls around, the whole world has to stop and learn all over again how black people got to where we are today. What I want to know is, how come we don't have a White History Month or a Mexican History Month, or an Asian History Month? All you hear is "black this" or "black that". I'm not saying that I hate black history or anything, but after you learn about it year after year and day after day it gets boring...really boring. I bet you I've learned about Martin Luther King and Malcome X every single year that I was in school, and I'm a junior now in high school about to be a senior.
Why don't we learn about white history or even mexican history? I bet you that half the people in my high school don't know that Cinco de Mayo is the Spanish Independence Day. But yet and still when someone black does something heroic it get plastered all over the news, and the whole nation is glued to the tv wondering what happened.
Like I said before, blacks get more negative attention than they do positive.

I'm not trying to say that I don't want to be black or anything like that because I fully love it! Not because constitutionally, we practically have a free ride even though domestically (I might have used the wrong word there.) we don't. I like being black because I can say that I'm different from any other race. Not because my ancestors were slaves, or I now have freedom through my ancestors, but because God made me in his own image.

Like I said before, (how many times have I said that? LOL.) my parents raised me to be who I am and to think for myself. Well this is what I think. My name is Kimberly Ann West, and I hate racism, but what I hate even more is the abuse of what little rights you have because they WILL NOT last forever, and you never know when someone will decide to come along and take them away.