Do it differently
Editor, The Commercial:
If God were to give me a do-over, I would choose to be a privileged white male again, but when I went off to college, I would have become an advocate for race-related change instead of a privileged white male in search of post-graduate fame and fortune.
More specifically, I would have used my God-given brain and charm and gumption to create an academic and spiritual curriculum that teaches all children — starting in pre-K — how to be good citizens and hard workers and entrepreneurs and color-blind philanthropists.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
I’m almost as white as the snow that blanketed so much of America recently. Black History Month intrigues me. I’m a 70-year-old liberal Democrat. I don’t have one white friend or relative who cares about the black cause as much as I do.
I went downtown last week to hear Andrew Feiler, a Jewish photographer and scholar, talk about Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist who more than cared about the Black cause back in the day. With a little bit of money and infinite love and chutzpah, he helped Black men and women build 5,000 schools for Black children in the segregated South. The Jewish businessman did not build the schools for the Black community.
I read — in the Pine Bluff Commercial section of the Gazette — about Joseph Carter Corbin, the remarkable Black man who came up with the “mathematics of liberation” — the theory and practice of saving an entire race of oppressed people by teaching them how to teach themselves.
A few years ago a white liberal said, it takes a village and proceeded to get rich off the vapid proclamation.
Since the first shipment of slaves was unloaded on this continent’s shores 400-plus years ago, Blacks and African-Americans have been building a foundation of self-esteem and entrepreneurial potential. And every step of the way, English, Gentile, and Anglo-Saxon men have been bulldozing Black and African-American achievement into the nearest ocean or landfill.
I’ve never been more ashamed of my American male whiteness.
Damien O. Thomas,
Little Rock