Race: You asked for it!

Hmmm, so! race is a sticky wicket, huh? I still vividly remember my own hangups about race (I acknowledge that I still have some). Much later I ran into the expression "Hybrid Vigor," from biology, a phenomena which enables species to improve much more rapidly than do marooned specimens that don't mix. Opposites attract. Strongly. Fess up, to yourself, not me, haven't you secretly wondered what it'd be like with someone from a very different-looking race? Listen, they didn't put all those breasts from darkest Africa years and years ago in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, an organ of the Smithsonian, isn't it! Huh? just to be faithful to the region they were featuring, no, no, they were obeying Nature's magnetism.

Have you still succeeded in NOT viewing the very fine motion picture, replete with a hanging, Mississippi Burning (1988) Academy Award, Best Cinematography? How about the very fine documentary about Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white man? Were you moved by the slightly querulous speech in which young Martin Luther King spoke a phrase soon to become famous, the first time for all of America to listen to, "Non-violence"? How lovingly he gently intoned the words!

African Americans are still not free. Peculiar in a way that some are dying in Iraq so that Muslims might be free.

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This coming Monday evening March 27, PBS, KCET in Los Angeles, is premiering a Burns documentary about the first American (and he might be the only American) to win a Nobel Prize for playwrighting, Eugene O'Neill. In LA it starts at 9 PM.

This same Documentarian, Ric Burns, made the breathtaking work, showing lots and lots of footage of African American boxer Jack Johnson in action. He looked as if he could have made quick work of Ali, even in Ali's prime.  A Dodger Baseball executive was fired for stating the historical truth that African Americans did well in sports because they were selected for their physical powers during slavery.  Odd that speaking the truth meets so much punishment. Must keep up appearances, must be careful to not make anyone uncomfortable. I love to repeat what William Faulkner wrote near the end of his novel Absalom Absalom. (Absalom, father of peace, born bc 1050), that the only solution to America's race problems was for the slaves to "bleach out like rabbits." I don't remember if those words came from the mouth of a character, or from the narrator, or from Faulkner himself.

Barry