Morgan Freeman, the actor, says everyone needs to stop observing “black” days and events like “Black History Month.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RosCZkH5uTI) Why? He says it only divides the nation, because whites have to keep silent, keep being reminded of past sins, real and perceived. Isn’t it biblical, to forgive and forget the past, and press on? Doesn’t God say he will forgive AS we forgive?

Booker T. Washington, black American political leader, educator and former president of Tuskegee University, said over a century ago when racism was indeed rampant: “There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy, and partly because it pays.
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. …There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”
(“My Larger Education”, 1911)

Stephen Douglass, the great ex-slave, orator and statesman who influenced Lincoln greatly, said: “I think the [white] American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just. I look over this country at the present time, and I see Educational Societies, Sanitary Commissions, Freedmen’s Associations, and the like, –all very good: but in regard to the colored people there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The [white] American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. (Union) General (Nathaniel) Banks was distressed with solicitude as to what he should do with the [freed but penniless] Negro. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!” (“What the Black Man Wants,” a speech to Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, April, 1865. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, by Philip S. Foner, International Publishers)

Racism has always been and will never end, it is endemic to humans. But perhaps solely in Western society has such a massive and noble movement existed to stamp it out. Dominant races need to be encouraged by minorities, who also need to guard against professional agitators. I look at the progress the nation has made in just my 75 years, and I opine “we ain’t done too bad, folks.”

Your books and writings inspire and sustain me.