My People

While I was at the Marine Corps Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, in 1982, a black colleague of mine accused me one day in front of our entire platoon of being a racist because I had graduated from Bob Jones University. He knew nothing else about me, but he hated me because he was sure I was a racist.

I hope the evidence of my life tells a different story. I am interracially married to a woman I met in the Philippines, and together in the mid-90's, we worked with black kids in an inner-city ministry through our church in Denver, Colorado. Then we came here to Kenya twelve years ago this month to work as missionaries among black African people. Last September our guard at our house, Ezekiel, who had worked for us the entire time we've been here suddenly died, leaving three orphaned girls in our care. (His wife had died three years earlier.) We paid for the funeral, and then put the girls in schools and are caring for their needs at this moment.

Racism is a two way street and there are many influences that may cause someone to be racist. I was in the ninth grade when desegregation came to my school in Denver. We had a welcome day for the fifty or so kids that came over, and I made it a point to try and make friends with them. One boy in particular, named Larry, was friendly to me and we often did things together at lunch, until one day as we were walking across the playground another black kid came up and Larry said to him, "Let's go hit some white boys on the chest." I stopped and looked at him with my mouth agape. They looked at me and then took off, got a little gang of eight or ten together and started terrorizing white kids across the playground. They didn't come after me and the only thing I can think is that I had tried to be friends with Larry so they left me alone.

Later that summer I was playing baseball. Our team had just beaten a team from a black neighborhood. After the game we sat down to watch the next game being played. While we watched the black kids from the team we had beaten came over and started harassing us and then started hitting some of our players. Our coach told us at first to ignore them, but when we couldn't we went to our cars and left. Interestingly enough, we had two black kids on our team. The confrontation started with the losing players calling those two boys the n-word.

Two years later in 1971, at South High School over two hundred black kids were bussed in to our school. Tensions were high and only two weeks into the school year they rioted, going down the hallways, breaking out windows and causing general mayhem. Police cars were out in the parking lot for about four days before everything got back to normal. Of course, normal was never the same after that, but I had plenty of negative influence in my life about black people, and it all came from black people.

And now I'm in Kenya taking care of three orphaned girls along with the rest of our work because no one in their large extended family is either willing or able to take the girls in. Let the "wazungu" (white people) do it is the attitude.

I lay this foundation because I am fed up with a society that will lay a charge of racism against any white person for anything they do or say with or about a black person that is not deemed to be "politically correct." I am tired of hearing the MSM accusing the Tea Party movement of racism simply because they favor conservative causes. I'm tired of a president, pandering to small minds, accusing anybody who opposes his agenda of racism while he violates the law and his oath of office and systematically destroys the Constitution.

This president, who was going to bring the people together and heal the racial divide among us, has done more to promote racism and drive a wedge between the races than any president in our history.

This past week Attorney General Eric Holder defended his decision not to prosecute the New Black Panthers, who had illegally intimidated people at polling places in Philadelphia during the 2008 elections trying to prevent them from voting for Republican candidates. You know the people they were intimidating, of course, were white. Holder's excuse was that to prosecute these thugs after black people had to fight for their own right to vote in the 60's would be a disservice to "my people."

My people? Is he talking about a different people than the American people? Whatever happened to the melting pot? What about e pluribus unum, "out of the many, one?" Out of the many that have come to our shores we are supposed to be one people. Apparently, Al Gore's ignorantly redefined version, "out of the one, many," is what we are now. And it has nothing to do with white people being racist.

It has to do with different racial groups holding onto their ethnic backgrounds and cultures and refusing either to become or to be American. John Wayne said it well in a recording called, The Hyphen:

The Hyphen, Webster's Dictionary defines, Is a symbol used to divide a compound word or a single word. So it seems to me that when a man calls himself an "Afro-American," a "Mexican American," Italian-American," an "Irish-American," "Jewish-American," what he is saying is, "I'm a divided American."

That is the whole problem. Instead of people working together to build a stronger America, we have black racists in our government intentionally dividing the country in order to find some kind of advantage for "their people." If Eric Holder is the Attorney General for only "his people" and not for all Americans, he needs to go.

I'll tell you who my people are. My people are Americans. My maternal grandparents immigrated from the Netherlands. They were Americans of Dutch descent, but they became Americans. My wife immigrated from the Philippines. She is an American of Filipino descent, but she is an American. If the problems in our country are going to be fixed, they are going to be fixed because We the People are Americans, and We the American People work together to fix them. If we remain divided without a singular national identity America as a nation will not survive.

Duke Wayne ended his discourse on The Hyphen with this:

So you be wise in your decision, and that little line won't cause division. Let's join hands with one another, for in this land, each man's your brother. United we stand, divided we fall. We're Americans, and that says it all.

God bless America, and God bless all who are truly Americans, no matter what color or ethnicity they are. These are My People.