Americans think “problem solved” because we are ruled by a black president named Obama and a black queen named Oprah.

He opened with a joke about one white street group with a bat and one black street group with a bat: Which is the baseball team and which is the street gang?

Whoopi claims New York, not African-American.

JFK was Irish, formerly not considered white…

Race isn’t fixed and immutable… Blonde-hair & blue eyes no not = “white,” necessarily. Walter White, head of NAACP, blonde-blue-eyed, was not “white.”

Race & new ethnicity are stupid ideas…meaningless, but seething with meaning:health, income, employment, history, making us who we are…race is our invention, only a few hundred years old…

Define race??? What does black mean?
What does white mean?

Europeans didn’t see themselves as white, but as members of their countries…

European Slavery began in North America with indentured servitude of fellow-Europeans

Later Songhai, Mandinkans, Tuaregs, became seen as black, as Negros because They were enslaved…

Not only blacks get victimized. White underclass “at least has their whiteness.”

Historically, white was something immigrants earned by abandoning cultural identifiers…languages…

Example given of a Jew who exhorted his cousin to let the got in teach him how to treat the Schwartzes…

Racial divisions between newest immigrant groups with older ones kept people from aligning. And if they stepped out if line, their jobs would be given to African Americans.

9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina — aid given and power restored only to “blood relatives.”

“Weapons of mass distraction… “Chuck D of Public Enemy… = boogeyman, threats, such as a 17 year old boy in a hoodie, or gay couple or Muslims or undocumented immigrants vs. predatory lending practices that cost people homes, schools that yield unprepared youth, an over-stressed military, or…

Black is still separate from American

It is past time that we are oblivious to being tied together in a single garment of destiny… In this interconnection. Are we destined to ONLY share the separation, the ways we are superficially different vs the bone deep, soul deep wYs we are all human…

(Power running out )

Leonard challenges us to seek common cause… Injustice anywhere = threat to everyone everywhere…we are tied together in a single garment of destiny…

We can avert our eyes from lessons if Trayvon and Eric Garner and Ferguson or we can give a damn…

I am looking at you…

You are looking at me… What do you see?

Leonard Pitts Isn’t concerned about ravening sheet-clad racists, but the majority of whites who let systemic racism go on without doing anything about it..,

Do You Think That fear of black men would go away if we socially took Responsibility for slavery?

Why haven’t we had an economic & social revolution?