By now, everybody in the world has heard about Empire’s (former) star Jussie Smollett’s racist hate crime hoax. We found out that $100,000 per episode was not enough. I also discovered there were people the age of my eldest grandchildren (33 – 37 years old) who thought that integration was the worst thing that could have happened to Black folks in America.

I’m almost 77 years old and as someone who grew up in segregated Alabama, I’m shaking my head in absolute amazement, screaming “WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE THESE PEOPLE SMOKING?”

And then there’s this simple-minded newlyelected Congresswoman from New York who has become a media darling but didn’t even know the difference in the three branches of government when she got elected; then one of the first things she did was to co-sign The Green New Deal, even before Freshman Orientation was over. All you have to do is listen to AOC and if you know how government works, you can tell she doesn’t.

So, as I listen to these “millennials” complain, I think back over my life as a black child growing up, as the President of the Miami Urban League, T. Willard Fair, is so fond of saying, “When things were Colored.”

It was not enough that in 1942, my mother wrote that I had to be born in my grandmother’s (Daddy’s mother) house because the nearest hospital was 30 miles away that Colored folks were allowed in. Momma tells a horror story of how there were only two doctors (both white) in the town – one was a racist drunk and the other liked to sexually assault Black women when their husbands weren’t home.

The racist was called as Momma’s water broke. But since he was at the movies, he had them call a midwife, who delivered me. When he arrived, Momma’s cervix was torn. He thought nothing of it, told the midwife to tie her legs together and left, after which Momma went into shock. They then called the pervert, who gave her a local and sewed her up, saying “That’s why so many colored “girls” are no good after their first baby. They’re left like this so the floor of the womb is weakened forever.”

That was my introduction into the world of racism. But not Momma’s.

In her book, “Pieces of Myself”, she wrote about being arrested for not saying “Yes Ma’am” to a young white sales clerk. She said in the section “AIN’T NO CRYSTAL STAIR,” “As long as the colored folks stayed ‘in their place,’ all was well and the whites remained the sole beneficiaries of all the rights and privileges of the town – always in control, undisputed and unchallenged by anyone but themselves.”

“If you were white, from the youngest to the oldest, you addressed all black men as ‘boys’ and black women as ‘girls’ or ‘auntie’.”

It was not enough that I grew up in that environment. I had to ride in the back of the bus behind the sign placed on the seats where the white bus driver wanted to place it, even though there may be very few white riders and lots of colored riders. I drank from water fountains labeled “colored” and would be jailed like Momma was if I drank from the fountain labeled “whites.”

It was not enough that driving out of town, we couldn’t use a public bathroom, but had to urinate on the side of the road. In 1963, while driving back from a Christian Mother’s Conference, our priest stopped at a gas station in Georgia for gas. I was 7 months pregnant and had to use the bathroom. The one labeled “colored” had no door and was filthy. I went into the one labeled “women” and within seconds the racist white attendant slammed the door open and pulled me out, cursing and screaming at me.

The one man in the car, the white priest, was too afraid to stop until we arrived back at the church several hours later.

There is not enough paper to recount all the real racist incidents that happened just to me, not to mention to my family and friends; yet I constantly hear people in my church talk about what they think are racist words coming from Donald Trump and Republicans.

All the incidents of real racism came from Democrats; yet for the past 50 years, people calling themselves “Blacks” or “African
Americans” don’t seem to have a clue as to what a racist says or does. They just repeat what they hear on Liberal-owned cable news, like CNN or MSNBC or NBC, CBS, ABC.

They believe when Dr. King and the Freedom Marchers finally got the right to vote and they voted Democrat for John Kennedy and every Democrat thereafter, all the racists left the Democratic Party and became Republican.

So much so that a successful TV actor could concoct a story so outlandish on its face and have the world believe him, especially when real hate crimes are happening to those people actually wearing MAGA hats.

A 57-year old white racist pulled a gun on a man and his wife in a Sam’s Club in the middle of the day in front of dozens of witnesses and said “This is a good day for you to die” – just because they had on MAGA hats. Yet only FOX NEWS reported it.

Yet every news outlet carried Jussie Smollett’s hoax daily for weeks. What a sad state of affairs! And they call that being “WOKE”? When is enough – NOT ENOUGH?