Centuries of kidnapping, torture, murder, rape. What white person can understand black lives? Not me. – Oliver Thomas, USA Today
The USA Today article drags on ad nauseam about the abuses the black man has endured at the hands of the white man before the author, who is also a white minister, gets to the point; that no white person can possibly understand the plight of the black man (So don’t even try!). After decades of progress in race relations in America, liberals like Oliver Thomas remind us that until we are able to discard the obsession the media, Democrats and academia have with race, we will never truly become a color-blind society. Writing an article that takes a reader back to atrocities that happened decades ago and discusses them as though they just happened yesterday, might make the author feel special, but it should also make the reader question where he’s been since the end of the civil rights era?
We should all be celebrating the accomplishments made by the greatest Civil Rights activist of our time today, but instead, USA Today author Oliver Thomas would prefer to label all whites as “racists” and accuse every white person of being responsible for his death. I am saddened to know Thomas is a minister and spends his time stirring this kind of racial hate. I am also sickened by how he has chosen to “honor” the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Oliver Thomas is a minister, lawyer and member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.
Oliver Thomas is a minister, lawyer and member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

Thomas’ article can be read below:

My dad called Martin Luther King an “agitator.” I bet a lot of white dads did. Seems like every time Dr. King showed up somewhere, things got torn up or burned up.

So we killed him. Not me, of course. I’m not a racist. But who thinks he is?

Notice how USA Today author Oliver Thomas is quick to point out that he’s, “not a racist,” just everyone else.

So we tried to fix it. Made his birthday a national holiday. Put him on a pedestal. Where we can honor him. And he can’t poke us in the eye.

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Plus, now we’ve squared everything. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Come on, we’ve even elected a black president! That’s why people who look like me have a hard time understanding why so many black people are still angry while others have given up on America altogether.

I’ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates boil it down for you. White society was not achieved through “wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land.” In short, through three centuries of kidnapping, torture, murder and rape. Broken teeth, broken bones and broken spirits. Families ripped apart. Children taken from their parents. Men humiliated in front of their wives. Women brutalized within earshot of their husbands. Lash after bloody lash on bare backs. Then, sleep on a bare wooden floor. No doctor, no dentist, no nothing. Just non-stop misery with a few hymns on Sunday.

We built an entire society on these bruised and broken backs. That and countless Native Americans driven off their land. Then, after the house of horrors fell, and the sin was purged by the blood of more than a half-million young mostly white men, white America still did not relent. Despite passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, states found ways to disenfranchise blacks. We took back the vote, cordoned blacks off in the most undesirable parts of our cities, forced them into inferior schools and denied them opportunities. Few blacks owned their homes. Many could not read and write. Thousands were lynched. That’s Southern for murdered without a trial. Imagine if that’s what black men had done to Robert De Niro or David Bowie for marrying black women.

The article can be read in its entirety on USA Today

 

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