On Monday, the women continued their “Hot Topics” by delving into whether or not progress has been made for people of color in the United States. I apologize for their lack of clarity but really, I have no control over it...

Whoopi asked whether or not, 40 years after Martin Luther King’s death, there are still little things that people need to talk about?

BW: Obama has talked about race the most- Barack Obama, when he was talking about Rev. Wright and where he said he really disagreed with him is that there has been so much progress all over the country…there was a statement that MLK said in 1967 “I’m sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist either consciously or unconsciously.”  Do you think that is still true?

Joy thinks we’ve made progress.

EH puts on her deep thinking face and says that people just hide it better now and wonders if maybe that’s worse…

If all that has been published about the Jena situation is accurate, all in America should be outraged. A quick note to SS: there is a least a decent possibility that some if not much of what she has heard about the Jena, LA events were distorted by activists whose goal is to promote racial conflict.  Perhaps she should read the article at http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1024/p09s01-coop.html to learn there may be more to the Jena story than she knows…

Whoopi acknowledges that progress has been made but then expresses concern about the ongoing economic challenges in the black community and “There is still a lot of problems that we need to deal with to balance it out.”

How exactly would she propose we balance out the economic problems in the Black community? Are these issues Whoopi alludes to really connected to race or are they socio-economic realities faced by people of all races? There are far too many young people of all races moving towards adulthood whose parents failed them.  Perhaps their parents were too young, or uneducated, or connected to or influenced by a drug culture. Perhaps their parents demonstrated a limited desire to lead a “better” life. There is a growing segment of our society that accepts living conditions that most of us wouldn’t dream of tolerating. There are even those people who acknowledge their choices are counterproductive to living a healthy, stable life but decide to accept the consequences of those decisions. Many of these people face the ongoning challenges related to a fractured familial support system.

What can we do to stop young people of all races from making choices that almost guarantee they will live a life of poverty?  What can we do to ensure that young children of every race start school fed, ready to learn and well-rested? What can we do to ensure that parents living in poverty do all they can to offer their children support at home and access to the tools, often available through schools, social service agencies and non-profit groups, to become successful adults? What can we do to ensure that all of our daughters grow up to believe they deserve to be loved and respected? To ensure they will have the strength to recognize and turn away from all who would do them any harm? How can we ensure that our sons grow up to believe in their ability to contribute to society and their families? To believe that they are important? That they must respect their neighbors, their girlfriends, their wives, their children?

The truth is we cannot force people to make good decisions and society in general has made the decision to not hold parents accountable for the educational, environmental and developmental neglect of their children. As long as individuals are allowed, in fact encouraged by a patronizing government system, to behave in ways that harm children there will be no solution to these problems.

Whoopi seems to suggest that the government needs to make amends. Neither governments nor communities build strong families.  Strong people create strong families. Strong families work to build strong communities. We have turned our system upside down and we need to begin to right it again.

Whoopi then says: And I think the idea that people are finally able to say, without getting jumped, “yes this is how I feel about x, y and z” that’s a huge leap to me and for that I am grateful to Barack Obama.

Sherri chimes in with: Martin Luther King, they called him a rabble rouser too.

She then quotes him, , saying “And you know what: a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the 40s will put Black people in a concentration camp and I am not interested in any concentration camp. I’ve been on a reservation too long now.”

Although I haven’t found this quote anywhere but in a LA Times story and a couple of blogs, it seems that, if he spoke these lines, they were spoken towards the end of his life, in a sermon. My guess is that one of her assistants forwarded her the LATimes article http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dyson4apr04,0,1840793.story  or one of the 2 blog posts that quoted it.  She, in an effort to be a good talking head, copied it onto her little card and read it dutifully… It seems that putting forth this line, compared to the endless quotes http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.   (click here for some examples) about nonviolence and the rejection of anger and hate, to justify the years of hate spewed by Wright is very disrespectful of Martin Luther King, Jr.