I recieved this email today:

Proud to be White-------that is okay!!!!!!!


Someone finally said it... How many are actually paying attention to this? There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, AsianAmericans, Arab Americans, etc.

And then there are just Americans.  You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You call me 'White boy,' 'Cracker,' 'Honkey,'  'Whitey,' 'Caveman'... and that's OK.



But when I call you, ******, Kike, Towel head, Sand-******, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink .. You call me a racist.



You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you... so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live?



You have the United Negro College Fund. You have Martin Luther King Day.



You have Black History Month. You have Cesar Chavez Day.



You have Yom Hashoah. You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi.



You have the NAACP. You have BET... If we had WET (White Entertainment Television), we'd be racists. If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists.



If we had White History Month, we'd be racists.



If we had any organization for only whites to 'advance' OUR, lives we'd be racists.



We have a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a Black Chamber of Commerce, and then we just have the plain Chamber of Commerce.   Wonder who pays for that??



A white woman could not be in the Miss Black American pageant but any color can be in the Miss America pageant.



If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships ...You know we'd be racists.



There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in the US .  Yet if there were 'White colleges' That would be a racist college.



In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your race and rights.  If we marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists.



You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you're not afraid to announce it.  But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.



You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police officer shoots a black gang member or beats up a black drug dealer running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist.



I am proud... But you call me a racist.



Why is it that only whites can be racists??



There is nothing improper about this e-mail.

We won't stand up for ourselves!  That's why we have lost OUR RIGHTS in this country.
 

  BE PROUD TO BE WHITE!


It's not a crime yet ... but getting real close!

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Ashley here:

Let's just say I blew a gasket.

I replied to all - including the boss of the person that sent it to me.  This was my reply:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.�



There is a very good reason that we have things like the NAACP, and Miss Black America.



They are things like the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow.



They are things like lynch mobs, and places like the Hotel Utah that refused to give Nat King Cole a room.



When I receive emails like this, I have to wonder if the authors are imbeciles, or just the biggest hypocrites on the face of the earth.  Because I have a really hard time believing that whoever it is that wrote this has ever once been called a “White boy,â€�  “Cracker,â€�  “Honkey,â€�  “Whitey,â€� or a “Caveman.â€�



And let me just say for the record, that if you use words like ******, Kike, Towel head, Sand-******, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink, that you are, indeed, a racist.  And a pretty sorry excuse for a human being on top of it.



It’s pretty late in the 20th century for this kind of thinking.  And it’s pretty pathetic that people are still forwarding this disgusting piece of trash email around.  You should be ashamed of yourself.

______________________________________________



The thing is though, I couldn't be less proud of being white.  Look at what white people have done to America.  The treatment of Native Americans?  Slavery?  Segregation?  The internment of Japanese people during WWII?  And people are actually PROUD of being WHITE?  Are you kidding me?

I can understand being proud to be Swiss or British, but White?  That's just insane!

The word that is ****** out is the N-word.  Just so there isn't any confusion.

I've already told you my thoughts on the "proud to be white" thing, but I'll repeat it.

No one, NO ONE, in this country is truly white, so to have someone discriminate against a different ethnicity is just ludicrous.  There has been so much mixing of ethnicities that you'd think racism would be a moot point by now.

Furthermore, what constitutes "white"?  That is a question that has always bothered me.  Anyone have a good definition of it?

I'm yellow.

I think the point they were trying (and failing) to make is that there's a double standard in racial perceptions, which I agree with in a sense but that joke wasn't really that funny and made me think that whoever wrote it wasn't all that intelligent to begin with.

having launched into a diatribe a few weeks ago regarding reverse sexism i guess i have to justify to myself now why i don't think reverse racism tends to be nearly as egregious. whenever i hear people bemoaning reverse racism they say things like, "how come black people get to call each other but I don't get to say ?" to which the immediate response that springs to my mind is, why do you WANT to use the N-word?  ??? but that signals a difference i've seen generally between the proponents of what the e-mailer in question might call "reverse racism" and what constitutes reverse sexism: usually black activists seem to favor appropriation of once-racist terms or the establishment of alternative black-centric organizations/institutions/etc. to make up for their hsitorical absence in caucasian-centric society. (there's something about the decrying of "black history month" when we don't have a white history month that reminds me of the old saw: SON/DAUGHTER: "if we have a mother's day and a father's day, how come we don't have a kid's day?" PARENT: "because every day is kid's day, you little sheesh.")

reverse sexism seems to take a different tack, from what i can tell. i havent really seen many black activists advocate that they should be able to make jokes about lynching white people, for instance, because such jokes against black people were once considered sort-of acceptable. with people who advocate reverse sexism, there's a lot more defense of literal verbal attacks against men as justified because historically jokes belittling women have been considered acceptable. from what i've seen of black activism it really wants to rise above the rancor of the past, whereas reverse sexists are much more concerned with reprisals, and with adopting the attitude of paleo-chauvinists and simply directing it against men rather than women.

that said, i think white guilt should be avoided too. folks (white folks, typically) who say 'i'm not really crazy about white people because they propagated slavery and jim crow" and so forth could maybe use a boost of self-esteem: viewing white people monolithically, or imagining you're culpable for crimes of the past because you share the race of the perpetrator, is kinda ... i dunno, kinda misses the point of striving to transcend racial stereotype, if you ask me. folks shouldn't stereotype themselves by race any more than they should stereotype others by race.