President Obama was inaugurated yesterday as the 44th President of the United States of America. No, it was not the signal of an ending to racial prejudice. If there was any hope that it would be, that was banished by Rev. Joseph Lowery when he closed the inaugural ceremony benediction by saying:
we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.
The reverend forgot that over 350,000 men (overwhelmingly white) from the Union side died in the Civil War fighting for an end to slavery. Yes, discrimination continued and it was whites who walked with Martin Luther King Jr. to obtain equal civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by a congress and signed by a President that was again overwhelmingly white.
Notice how Lowery portrays race relations. Black, yellow, and red have no obligations to act while white people are assumed to be universally wrong and the contributions of those white people who struggled against racial prejudice are ignored. Who is the racist?