Monday, ground was broken on the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial on the national mall. It is a momentous occasion for Americans in general and African Americans in particular. All of that said, am I the only one who thinks a hundred million dollars is a lot of money for an outdoor monument? If they are going with the sketches I saw before, the monument is going to be completely outdoors. Maybe a fountain someday, but still completely outdoors. A hundred million dollars for a patio, and not even a covered one? Wow. President Bush led the groundbreaking ceremony. I tell you, our president has gone from standing up the NAACP for six years to making the convention and the King Memorial groundbreaking all within six months. The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Just when you were getting happy about the progress minorities have made in America…
A new report released by the census bureau (yes, this is the 2000 census data, that they decided to take six years to process, and off on a slight rant – don’t we deal with computers these days? did it really take six years to get these numbers? hmm…) says that racial disparities in income, education and home ownership are continuing and growing in these here United States. There are some facts in this story that I really don’t agree with, but they could be my own perspective on things. It cited world war II discrimination as a factor that kept black people out of home ownership. Yet, during this time, both of my parents’ families, who were in the deep South and in the midst of overt oppression, lived in huge pockets of land and homeowning African Americans. I kind of wonder why home ownership would not continue in these families. How much of these disparities are borne of discrimination and how much of them are simply because of poor planning on the part of people who know they have to hit the ground running in their quest for the American dream.
TJs Things 
Leave a comment