In a speech marking Black History Month, when the newly appointed Attorney General, Eric Holder was speaking to his office, he said that we are a “nation of cowards” when it comes to addressing the race issue. That’s a pretty provocative statement, but it fails to identify “why” we are a nation of cowards when it comes to a candid discussion of the race issue. Of course I have a viewpoint. Two names make my point. They are Rush Limbaugh and Al Sharpton. Both of these men often have candid discussions on the issue of race, but it is so often polarizing to both sides, that simply evoking the name of either man polarizes people on either side of the race issue. The problem is deeper in that the
While reading a biblical passage in Esther, I immediately took note of the statement that said, "many became Jews." There in Persia where King Xerxes (Ahasuerus in the bible) was ruling, not only was he friendly to the Jews, but many of his subjects, modern day Iranians, actually became Jewish. Such was the concept of humankind. The idea that people could be classified according to skin pigmentation would not be on the scene for almost 2000 more years. Even then, when a French Naturalist, Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon introduced race in 1749, he did so as a means of demarcating a group of people from a geographic region. It was only a matter of time until this segmenting/dividing of p
