A Violent and Unjust History

A Violent and Unjust History

The staff of UMSL Blog agree that our two favorite words are Peace and Justice. In this most excellent comic strip you see how the violence of the past promotes the injustice of the present.

I grew up in Fulton Missouri, in the particularly racist center of the state known as "Little Dixie". I was told by my schoolmates, after flirting with a young African American girl at a little league game, that if I kissed a black girl I would have to take a special medicine or I would turn black too. I asked my dad if this was true and he said, "no that's not true, but the truth is much worse." He then went into a now historic racial tirade on the "inferior n____r race" and how they are "different from us" and have an antithetical moral and ethical base. Sure, some of them are good, "as long as they stay away from white women and liquor they do fine", he told me with the same stone faced conviction he projected when he spoke of the beauty of nature, the value of hard work and the strength of America. By kissing the black girl, he went on, I was forfeiting the natural advantage I had by being born white and would become prone to the relaxed morality they espoused.

Time, education, experience and the natural goodness I learned from my mother kept those seeds of racism from taking root. Traveling to Central America, living in the West, learning Spanish and working in the food industry have made me become an avid fan of diversity. Not the clinical, sociological diversity that is part of poster board "political correctness", but the joy and wonder of talking and working and eating and playing with people who are different from me, but the same as me.

Peace is an end to violence, oppression and explotation, justice is the beginning of world of oppurtunity and hope for all. We can't have one without the other and we can't have either if we think in terms that exclude and label. Let all of us be the step ladder the African American in the comic strip needs and deserves!