source: Essence.com

When writing here I will try my best to resist the urge to speak about folks who disagree with me in a demeaning way. My mother always told me that if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all. Well in this instance I’m going to ignore mom’s advice, sort of. It’s not that I want to be mean or call names. In fact, I don’t think I’m doing that. I’m just bothered by a nagging question. I really can’t resist the urge to ask it.

Is Amy Holmes just straight stupid or is it just an act?

source: The New York Post

Apparently I’m not the only one with this question. If you go to Rick Sanchez’s blog on CNN many of the commentors question whether Amy is dumb, clueless (different than dumb) or just putting on a show. How could Amy not have seen the now imfamous cartoon in The New York Post as racist? And even if she didn’t, how could she have, with a straight face, come up with that cock-eyed defense of the cartoon. But let me not get ahead of myself.

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Flickr by 77krc

So daughter number one (Thing One or T-One) complained to me the other day that she had to do yet another paper on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She then went on to explain how she’ll have to do a paper a year all the way up through middle school. Still being of single digit age, I doubt my daughter has any real understanding of King’s significance, especially in the Obama era.

I asked her what was wrong with writing a paper a year on King. She responded that she was running out of things to say. Mind you, each paper so far has been a one paragraph essay. She went on to explain, “All he did was help end segregation!” (As if that’s some small feat.)

My mother (The Duchess), who was in earshot, gasped. “All he did?” My mother grew up in the segregated south, participated in sit-ins and marched on Washington in ’63. So to her saying that s all King did was, well, a little disappointing. But my mom wasn’t so disappointed in my daughter. She was disappointed in me. Somehow I had dropped the ball in making my daughter aware of her history. Where we had been as people of color in this country and how far we had come.

“That little girl needs to know!”  [Read more →]