I saw The Great Debaters last night. I spent a good deal of the film feeling even more fired up that we need to continue to fight racism in this country, only lately the racism is more obviously against middle easterners and Mexicans. It is as if racism against these groups is acceptable, as racism against blacks was not so long ago.
I feel so strongly that as a white person, the thing I can do to fight racism is to call it when I see it. Racism is racism is racism. I will not accept racist emails in my inbox clothed in the mask of righteous indignation about how our tax dollars or spent or sent as some deceitful public service message claiming to be about “protecting” me from terrorism when it is really bigotry, and not even much disguised bigotry.
I get SO angry that this continues. As I watched The Great Debaters last night, I got even more fired up about the email I had received on Christmas day. I came home and felt that fire and wanted to DO something and wondered, what can I do? I can write. I lay in bed unable to sleep with the desire to write something, anything more than just an angry response to a bunch of bigots. As I did this, I conceived a novel. I have all of the characters. I have the location. I have the basic premise of the story. And I am going to write it and hope that ONE person reads it and THINKS and gets as fired up against racism as I did when I received that racist bullshit bird poop email and as I watched The Great Debaters.
It is time for those who hate racism in this country to stand up against the racism that is allowable now, racism against middle easterners and Mexicans. It is time to say that racism against these people is NOT okay. Ever.
Random Thoughts on Everything and Nothing 
Beyond the question of racism is how a democracy – the most just form of government on the face of this earth because the governed ALWAYS get what they deserve – is run. As the young debater illustrated, he witnessed an instance in which there was only one dissenting voice – that of the black man still smoldering at the end of a rope. Or as Madison spoke of it in Federalist Number 10,
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed10.htm
“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
To govern under such a system of democracy takes in informed citizenry, not a bunch of fat heads who think they know everything.