The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Amy Slater,
Boyne City, MI
This quote by Hannah Harrington has always been one of my favorites. It really is easy to choose hate. I see and hear more negativity than positivity around me. Choosing to love takes more work. It means branching out and feeling a little vulnerable. But what if everyone chose to love instead of hate? Could this world be a better place if we all chose love, kindness, and compassion?
Bob Thomas,
Rabun Gap, GA.
I have been working on a web site for the Lillian E. Smith Foundation located in Rabun County, Georgia. In doing research for the project I’m learning more and more about a remarkable woman who as a Southerner spoke out frankly and with unflinching certainty against segregation. As an author she used her talents to write many works, both fiction and non fiction, exposing the devastating effects on both blacks and whites. While the damage to and disdain for African Americans could not be hidden but could be ignored, whites were destroying themselves by using oppression and hatred to control others. Lillian Smith did not ease herself into the civil rights movement she threw herself headlong into it with the power of her words and deeds. She is a role model of courage and humanity not only for her work in the civil rights movement but that she rose above the affects of severe illness to continue that work. I am proud and humbled to have her life touch mine.
Melanie Cowart,
Fair Oaks Ranch, TX.
My parents were married in 1934 when miscegenation was illegal in most states. Until I was older, I didn’t realize how much courage it took for them to be together. My mother, who was white, raised her two daughters, now 80 and 62, to be proud African-American women. I’m so sorry she did no live to see the election of President Obama, another child of mixed heritage but who associates more with the African-American community. The hardest part about being racially ambiguous is always having to explain who I am to other African-Americans. Even in 2015, I walk into a room and the conversation stops, while everyone questions in their minds, ” Who’s the white girl?” For all our protests about discrimination, African-Americans can be the most prejudice of their own race. Someone once told me the prejudice stems from plantation times when lighter slaves worked in the house and darker slaves in the field, a technique used by plantation owners to create a division. Well, must we as a race hold onto those old plantation stereotypes? All members of the human race need to be as accepting of each other as my parents were when it wasn’t even considered morally or legally acceptable to ignore skin color.
Yvonne Ovachi Bennett,
Leesburg, FL.
For every wrong there’s a right. Everything has a perfect opposite…. Hate/Love, Die/Live, Loss/Gain, No one/Everyone!!!!
Courtney,
Moore, OK.
I am told this quite offten and it makes my heart ache, not because I let it bother me personally, beause I don’t. But for the other black women and young ladies that are told the same thing and don’t have the courage to say that I am a beautiful black women, not pretty for a black women. We will always have hate and inequality in this world, as long as we have ignorance. And we will always have ignorance in this world, as long as we are willing to keep our mouths shut and let things be.
Mary Collins,
Fort Wayne, IN.
Colorblindness is not true appreciation of differences.
Patricia Bobadilla Sundelin
Umea, Sweden
You will never be forgotten for the strength and courage and the will and hope for a equal world for all.
Sue Schiller,
USA.
Rather than integrate them, our city closed the public schools in September 1958. When they reopened in January 1959, Geraldine (I know her last name, I will never forget it) was the only Black student in my school. I will never forget seeing her walk down the hall during change of classes, clutching her books to her chest. It is a picture imprinted in my brain. I could never have had the courage to do what she did.
Anonymous,
Oakdale, MN.
The Serenity Prayer is used by many different kinds of recovery groups because it helps focus ones strength on the issues one can control and helps to let go of those one cannot control. Its a tough prayer to apply all the time, but the one part I can always apply is the “Courage to change the things I can” with the emphasis that I can always change myself and my attitude, with courage.
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