Is That The Best You Have To Offer The Situation?
2009 October 4
UPDATE: I don’t even know what made me think this was Louis Farrakhan! My apologies for misnaming the speaker I was talking about. Thanks to the commenter who pointed out my mistake. (I was not, however, talking about Jesse Jackson’s comment)
A young man was brutally beaten to death by his peers. It was caught on cellphone video.
But death was not the evil – violence was not the evil. The evil – gleaned from Louis Farrakhan’s El-Hajj Khalid Samad’s statement at the funeral – was that the event was black on black violence. His comment? Watch this:
It is NEVER okay for ANYONE to brutalize ANYONE – I don’t give a rat’s patootie if they’re PURPLE!!
Uh.. That was Rev. Jesse Jackson.. not Minister Louis Farrakhan and I did not hear anything wrong in his comments? Did I miss something?
First, my apologies for misnaming the speaker I was referring to. I was speaking about the comments made by El-Hajj Khalid Samad. I can’t even say where I got Louis Farrakhan from – if nothing else, I CAN read, and Samad was clearly identified on the clip. A true “DUH” moment for me!!
The problem I have with Samad’s statement is his concentration on the color of the victim and his assailants. His indignation was with the fact that this was a crime involving blacks on both side. This was a horrendous event – and what made it horrendous was not the color of skin, but the depth of evil and darkness in the actions of the killers. That evil and darkness resides in all humankind – regardless of skin color.
Society needs to stop focusing on the classification of “Race” – which points out our differences in appearance – and start focusing on the classification of “Homo Sapien” – which points out the fact that we are the same at the core! And, as a society, we must stop giving credibility, and voice, to those who continue to focus only on the color of a person’s skin. People who gain their notoriety in this fashion are not looking for answers to the problem anymore than drug companies whose best sellers are chemo drugs are looking for the cure to cancer. It is a natural conflict of interest.