This quote by the “Greatest” was the sense of the country at the time yet we still are in overseas wars. If you change the word “Negroes” with “LGBT, immigrants (legal or illegal) or the poor, you have modern America.

Please Donate

A TV ad representing  a National Insurance company has a mime talking and a baby commenting on it, I wonder what the baby would have to say about this article>

Religion

North Carolina Church Wanted “Only White People” as  Greeters

Freedom House Church did not seem all that free this  weekend.

By Elizabeth  Dias @elizabethjdiasSept. 03, 20130

 

<img src=”http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/172740305.jpg?w=480&h=320&crop=1&#8243; alt=”172740305″ title=”172740305″/>

Freedom House Church did not seem all that free this weekend.

Makeda Pennycooke, the church’s executive pastor of operations, sent an email  to church volunteers asking that “only white people” greet worshippers at church  services. The email said that  leaders anticipated an increased number of visitors in the coming weeks, and  that since “first impressions matter,” the church wants “the best of the best on  the front doors.”

An outraged church member received the email and sent it to local news  station WBTV. The controversy is complicated because Pennycooke is a black  woman, while senior pastors Troy and Penny Maxwell are white. Nonetheless, the  church’s request was hard to misinterpret. ”We are continuing to work to  bring our racial demographic pendulum back to mid-line,” Pennycooke  wrote. ”We would rather have less greeters on the front door if it means  that the few that we have will represent us the best.”

Freedom House, a diverse church in north Charlotte, has already apologized  for the incident. “The email was sent by one of our longtime pastors in an  attempt to emphasize that our greeting team reflect the racial diversity of our  entire congregation,” a church spokesperson wrote in a statement to WBTV. “However, she admitted it was a mistake to over-emphasize any specific  group and sent an apology email within 24 hours of the original email going  out.”

Freedom House has four services every weekend. Five values drive its mission,  according to the church website: “We are  an equipping church (Ephesians 4:11-13); a relationally  healthy church (Matthew 18:19-20); an excellent church (Daniel  6:3); a leadership church; and a generous church (Proverbs  11:24-25).”

If anything, the incident serves as a reminder of another biblical passage,  Apostle Paul’s teaching that the Christian gospel breaks down all barriers  between humans. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or  free, there is no longer male and female,” he wrote in the New Testament book of  Galatians. “All of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

UPDATE at 2:15pm: Here is the full statement and apology  from Freedom House regarding the incident.

One of our longtime pastors, in keeping with our church’s desire to be  inclusive and intentionally reach out to all races, noticed our front door  greeting team was no longer reflecting the racial diversity of our entire  congregation, and she wanted potential visitors to see people like themselves  upon entering our church. However, she made an error in judgment in requesting  all white greeters at the front door, going overboard in placing emphasis on any  one race over another in trying to highlight diversity within the greeting team.  She admits this was a grave lapse in judgment and is sincerely sorry for her  actions. She immediately apologized and has asked our forgiveness. She and  senior pastors have made themselves available to meet with any church members  who want to discuss this situation with them, and have communicated their true  heart in this matter — to be a church welcoming and inclusive to  all.  Freedom House believes in a diverse relationship within its  membership, reflecting the larger community in which the church resides, doing  life together as a church representative of everyone — culturally, ethnically,  economically, and generationally.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/09/03/north-carolina-church-wanted-only-white-people-as-greeters/#ixzz2ds4nuvpM

Please Donate

Politics as usual, this excerpt from Jonathan P. Hicks points out where we are relative to the political system.

The GOP’s Failure to Honor Martin Luther King Jr.

• By: Jonathan P. Hicks

GOP House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) attends a recent news conference. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The conspicuous failure of Republicans to pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. this week reveals precisely where African Americans rank in the party’s pecking order and highlights the nation’s widening racial chasm, Jonathan P. Hicks writes at BET.

There was one group curiously absent from the memorializing: Republicans.

Not one GOP figure attended the event at the Lincoln Memorial. There was no sign of House Speaker John Boehner or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Absent, too, was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. There was not a Bush in sight, not even the politically ambitious Jeb. Not even the lone Black member of the Senate, Tim Scott of South Carolina, took the time to join the group on the mall to honor the Dr. King’s legacy.

It’s fascinating that the party that, in the aftermath of the 2012 president election, admitted the importance of reaching out to African-American and other non-white voters would essentially declare the King event off-limits.

After all, Dr. King was not the least bid steeped in the politics of his time: He sought to appeal to the moral conscience of Republicans as well as Democrats, having as much faith — and distrust — in each party. His widow maintained close relationships with the various presidents, irrespective of party. And it was, after all, Republican icon Ronald Reagan, who signed into law the official U.S. holiday known as Martin Luther King Jr. Day …

But more importantly, the absence of Republicans reveals precisely where African-American citizens rank in the GOP pecking order. It reveals in stark clarity that they long less for ways to attract Black voters than they pine for an era where Black voters were irrelevant politically.

Read Jonathan P. Hicks’ entire piece at BET.

The Root aims to foster and advance conversations about issues relevant to the black Diaspora by presenting a variety of opinions from all perspectives, whether or not those opinions are shared by our editorial staff.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.   

Please Donate

<!– Tags:

• 50th anniversary March on Washington
• March on Washington
• March on Washington Republicans
• march on Washington at 50
• march on washington GOP
• obama march on Washington

–>

59

Kent Connecticut is the scene of a largely unknown struggle for reclamation of native American  tribal lands. The Schaghticoke tribe is fighting to survive, the U.S. government has required native tribes to show the ownership of the land they live on since before colonization, under new guide lines they only have to show continuous existence since 1934. This allows the tribes to own the lands they exist on and even the lands now inhabited by newcomers (first white settlers). The Euro presence in the modern and past world has been noted by the conquest and indenturing of all native people wherever they went. This conquest resulted in the death and elimination of many people  and their traditions. It is a far cry now from then as people we have all come to the realization that in order to survive as a species we need to work together beyond religious, color, ethnic and gender lines. Even “Star Trek” has moved beyond those barriers. Why can’t we?

Please Donate

George Zimmerman is currently a free man, His lawyers now want the State of Florida to pay his legal expenses, this after his wife attempted to hide their assets (she is now being tried for that). If the State of Florida pays his legal expenses then does this mean it is open season on anyone of color, any of the LGBTG community (which includes all colors) or perhaps a person of a different religious persuasion?  We have a murderer who is free due to the lack of personal conviction on behalf of all of the jurors. The Prosecution missed opportunities in some key areas of their case. Was this deliberate or just an omission due to inexperience, lack of funds or something else? It has been pondered about the result if the Zimmerman was Black ( yes there are non whites with name of Zimmerman). This is just the latest in a series of injustices against minorities and will not be the last as the fringe extremists such as “George” or Jorge  as he would be called in Latin America will take heart in doing the same thing in their own communities. These last few years has brought out the best and worst of us all but this situation is almost like giving a tacit OK on assaults on NON whites of all types. If this were monopoly George would have a “get out jail free card” from the stack of cards in the center while the rest of could not pass go, let alone get $200.00

Please Donate

The post below could apply to “LBGT”, Native Americans. Latinos and immigrants.

Editors note: Tanner Colby is the author of “Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America.”

(CNN) — “So, how many black friends do you have now?”

It’s a question I get asked a lot, ever since I set out five years ago to find out why I, your typical middle-class white person, had no black friends at all.

I do have black friends now, actually. Several. But I rarely offer that information when asked, because to ask white people how many black friends they have is to pose the wrong question.

Recently, a Reuters poll came out showing that 40% of white Americans have zero nonwhite friends, and only 20% of white Americans have five or more nonwhite friends. People seemed shocked that the numbers were so bad.

Tanner Colby

Personally, I was surprised that they were so good. America remains a deeply segregated and divided country. Even accounting for institutional and socioeconomic barriers, in the places we have the opportunity to integrate—the high school cafeteria, for instance—we largely don’t.

The Reuters survey itself is misleading, lumping all minorities together under the vague heading of “nonwhite.” Depending on what part of the country you live in (e.g, anywhere but Minnesota or Wyoming), it’s not uncommon to have Asian or Hispanic friends.

But the social divide between whites and those groups is more a function of the slow-rolling, generational process of immigrant assimilation. That is a wholly different phenomenon from the social divide between whites and blacks, which is the product of 400 years of slavery and segregation. That’s the social divide we should worry about, and if the poll had focused on that, the numbers would surely have been much worse.

The reason why “How many black friends do you have?” is such a terrible question is because it shows how we typically talk when we talk about race. Even when we try to talk about race in a constructive way, we usually make black people the object of the sentence, rarely the subject.

Black friends are the things to be acquired to prove one is not racist. The way the question is asked accords black people no agency, nor does it reveal anything about the real character of the white person being queried.

What you really want to know is not “How many black friends do I have?” but rather, “Have I become the type of individual that a black person might choose to be friends with?” That’s a real question. Poll a couple thousand white people with that and you might start to get some interesting answers, or at least some confused and befuddled looks.

White people are products of their own whitewashed, sanitized environment. Black people have been systematically excluded from white neighborhoods. Black stories rarely surface in popular culture. The history of race in high school textbooks has been boiled down to a handful of bedtime stories about Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks. Try to tap into the average white person’s feelings on race and you won’t necessarily find feelings of hate and antipathy. You just won’t find much of anything, no fully formed or well-considered thoughts about race of any kind. There’s nothing really there. Even white people who want black friends don’t know where to start.

America’s lack of integration wouldn’t be such a big deal except for the fact that relationships and social networks are vital to economic advancement.

Even when programs like school busing and affirmative action give black people access to white spaces, when those people go to climb the social ladder there’s nothing there for them to grab onto, because there’s very little reciprocal effort coming from the other direction. It’s high effort and low reward.

The result is that black people end up with integration fatigue. Many black writers responded to the Reuters poll with essays on why they didn’t want white friends, and didn’t need them. White friends weren’t worth the bother.

This is their prerogative, but ultimately, it’s to society’s disadvantage because white people control the access to, well, just about everything. If you don’t have white friends, you might have a decent job and a comfortable life, but all the doors of opportunity in this country are not open to you. “I may do well in a desegregated society,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but I can never know what my total capacity is until I live in an integrated society.”

Interracial friendships, social bonds across the color line, are a key factor in putting the sins of America’s past behind us. But it’s not something that’s accomplished by white people knowing lots of black people. It helps if white people know how to be better white people.

Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.

Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Tanner Colby

Please Donate

Has George Zimmerman single handedly caused a glut  of hoodies due the high profile case resulting from the death of Trayvon Martin? Since the master profiler and his adjunct members (Geraldo (Gerry Rivers) et al have designated hoodies as the garb of choice by criminals (especially if they are non white), the industry has all but collapsed. What ever will happen to the athletes who wear them, what will happen to the manufacturers and the sponsors who pay to have their logos placed on them? Are we looking at the end of the hoodie? Could it be that ski caps, beanies and watch caps be next on the list of  “criminal” wear?  When will we approach the final frontier of “criminalizing” wearing apparel the business suit?  When in the future you have to get a permit for a hoodie-Thank George Zimmerman!

Please Donate

I have read the State Journal Register  for a number of years and had a few opinions printed. I understand that opinions are just that-opinions but many are rooted in personal politics and  biases with a shortage of facts. There are two syndicated columnist that appear regularly whose entries are treated with more regard than they deserve as their  basis serve no one than the author while denigrating the American public and the newspaper. I am purposely omitting the names as I do not want to give any more coverage to these individuals than the currently receive. I have always thought journalists were supposed to offer truth first regardless of their personal politics but apparently this is not modern norm. I am considering ending my subscription as the SJ-R seems to support this unilateral method of news gathering and presentation. The print media while certainly suffering in this electronic age still has the responsibility to present the facts in as neutral a manner possible, the bias should be the personal bailiwick of the reader, not the publisher or editor.

Please Donate