Mixed Race Studies

What the Coloring of America Requires of White People

Three-Fifths
2021-11-08

Frank Robinson
Austin, Texas

The Census makes clear that America’s demographics are changing. The percentage of white Americans dropped, while percentages of people of color, of multiethnic and multiracial people, increased. Welcome to our emerging reality.

To some whites, this is the dreaded harbinger of a nightmarish future where we are not in control. Numbers only confirm what’s been underway for some time. Like it or not, we must learn to voluntarily surrender every existing sense of entitlement to control the spaces we occupy. What is called for is the giving of respect.

All white people are not dismayed, afraid or angry. Many are secretly or openly hopeful of America becoming better, doing better. Some have invested time to learn facts and actual history, done work on themselves, and even with imperfect understanding, they step up, speak up and put themselves at risk of hostile neighbors, kinfolk, and co-workers. Some do it out of human decency, some with conviction this is good, godly, and right. If that’s you, I want to encourage you and say I’m kinda proud of you. Keep moving forward in educating yourself to become the thermostat and not the thermometer in your sphere of influence. Learn from good examples. Also, learn what not to do from bad examples and failures, including your own…

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Like a Broken Record

Three-Fifths: Voice of Clarity
2021-07-08

Frank Robinson
Austin, Texas

President Johnson ponders Dr. King and the process of getting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 worked out. On reflection, this is more of the déjà vu we are experiencing.

As this generation walks through the social-political minefields of our day we pass anniversaries of notorious race-based mob attacks, riots and massacres: Tulsa’s Greenwood, election day at Ocoee, Wilmington, Rosewood, the infamous Red Summer, and many others. The land is stained with innocent blood. But, how many of today’s issues have we seen, never remedied, and must deal with again and again?

Confronted with factual atrocities, many respond, “That’s all in the past, a tragic, uncomfortable conversation without any relevance, because we are not racists now.” Thus, we deflect and conceal so much that contributes to our present condition. Some don’t want these things remembered or taught in schools. But why are we threatened by facts? Isn’t our denial and ignorance of facts why some saw fine people in Charlottesville, but thugs in Minneapolis?

A devout, but misinformed white friend told me Black leaders lie to their people, “to keep them blaming and hating whites.” He said he could not be a racist, as he has mixed-race grandchildren and a Black friend, a billionaire he golfed with, and if what I said was true, his friend would have told him. I assured him no matter what his Black friend drove, if stopped by the police, his life was in danger…

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