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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 660152" data-attributes="member: 17461">Both granddaughters have Native blood.  Each has experienced racism of a hurtful, to the core kind.  One experienced having a man come up to her as though he believed her beautiful, look closely into her eyes and say:  "Oh.  I thought you had blue eyes."And I know that to someone who has never experienced it, that would mean nothing.  But to someone who understands something about blue eyes and something else altogether about her own, brown eyes ~ it was hurtful.  She has never forgotten it.  It was a subtle form of hurt you with your own hurt that happens all the time.  Not so much a naming of who you are, but of who you are not.Having Native grands has introduced me to my own prejudice.  I did not entertain prejudicial leanings knowingly.  I was surprised to find that I was prejudiced.  Like it is with our FOO and the curses and messages they left us with, so it is with our own prejudice.  We cannot see it until we can.That is what is meant when people speak of white privilege.  If my grands were not Native, I would not know what anyone meant when they talked about racism or prejudice, either.  So, I think we cannot fault any of the sides, here.  All the parties ~ even the far left and the far right ~ are part of an experiment, are part of a new way of living and helping and honoring (and hating ~ but it is honest and out in the open and that is a good thing) never tried anywhere in history.  We are doing really well, I think.  Problems are coming into the open and Presidents are there, and Amazing Grace is being sung for all of us.One voice into many.So many of us are so unhappy with so many things. That is okay.We have come such a far way from where we began, and we are getting there.  Not just around issues of racism but around issues of economics and equality and religious freedom ~ and everywhere you look, we are taking ourselves seriously and believing we can figure out how to do this better.  I am so proud to be an American, SWOT.  This has never happened, before.  We are doing something impossible, here in this country.  It isn't perfect, but we are aiming for perfect.There is nowhere like this country, where the fabric of our pasts and the quality of trust regarding our futures enables us to grit our teeth, dig in, and battle it out, creating lasting change in the name of decency.  Of course we make mistakes.  We are powerful; everything we do here, each decision made here, affects the world, for better or for worse.But we rectify our mistakes.We try to steer a fair and certain course.I am like, ridiculously, gloriously proud to be an American.  We are a bright and generous people.  I believe in us and what is being created here; believe it is something never seen, never remotely possible,  before.Always, tyranny and even outright slavery have been legitimized.  A benevolent king is still a king; benevolence can change overnight into its opposite.  This country, this form of government, is a fledgling miracle.:O)Cedar</blockquote>

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