my response to Dima concerning Rev. Wright

Dima wrote:

Walter,
If you said the things this racist pig has said and substituted "black people" for "white people" you would be shot the next day. I for example had nothing to do with slavery yet am being discriminated because of the color of my skin. I hope you're writing this stuff to get a rise out of people and don't really believe this.
-Dima

Dima,
Of course I mean what I wrote. This country that you and I love, and which Obama loves and I believe, Rev. Wright loves as well despite his justifiable anger, has a hideous, murderous history in regard to its treatment of black people--quite analogous in its own way to Germany's genocide of the Jews. Beofre you get too bent out of shape at that comment, ask yourself how many milllions of blacks died during the 'middle passage' on the slave ships from Africa to America over 200 years, and from being worked to death on plantations. We dont know for sure, but I believe the numbers equal or surpass six million. That is a bitter legacy that all Americans have an obligation to work to repair whether they were born here as I was or came as immigrants as Dima and many of the readers of this blog did. Having been born elsewhere doesnt absolve you of that responsibility, Dima. You moved to America and became an American citizen, and in doing so you assumed the responsibility that all Americans bear. But you are hardly the only one who doesnt want to deal with the responsibility of that historyt, which the Germans, to their credit, have taken up to try to make recompense to the Jews for the genocide their fathers and grandfathers committed. If America was facing its moral responsibilities in the same way, there would be a National Slavery Museum in Washington, as well as a National Holocaust Museum. But of course, it is easier to decry a genocide committed by another nation (the Germans) than one committed by the Good Old USA.

And we are not only talking of the times of slavery. Dima, as I've written here before, when I was 9 years old in 1959 and travelled to Virginia for the first time with my parents and went to the Mens's Room in the diner where we stopped that morning, I was stunned to find out that there were 4 bathrooms there; for White Men, Colored Men, White Women and Colored Women. 1959 aint that long ago, Dima. As Obama said in his brilliant and inspirational speech, Rev. Wright and his generation all lived through that and much much worse and of course they are still angry. Yes, as Obama also said, there HAS been undeniable progress on race relations in this country over the past 20-30 years, but we still have a long long way to go. Dima, who lives in worse conditions; the Russian Jews of Brighton beach or the African-Americans of Coney Island. So where do you get off claiming to be the one who is "discriminated against"?