No Need for Pirates of the Caribbean Style Plundering

And looking at my own history, I empathize with racists too as my father was a racist. I have no idea why. My view when I was a child was that it was economic. Dad was a building and grounds maintenance department manager in a small company with seven kids. In my mind as a child, he was a glorified janitor. While that is perhaps a harsh assessment, I think he might have agreed with that assessment because I never sensed he was proud of himself despite the breadth of knowledge he had and applied in maintaining that building.
So, my guess was that his racism was because people have a need to feel superior to someone. Being towards the bottom of the economic ladder, he could justify his own life by the idea that he was superior to blacks.

Comedy Changes My Own View

Interestingly, the man who did more for my getting over my childhood than anyone else was Bill Cosby. While Martin Luther King was a great man, I was little affected by him. To me, he was a leader for the black community. But Bill Cosby was the greatest comedian of my lifetime. I used to sit and laugh so hard at his routines. And then I realized that what he described, I, a white boy, understood and related to.

If that was true, then blacks must be like me. I must be like them. There wasn’t a great difference dividing us other than the color of our skin. I’m grateful to God for teaching me this through humor. Because of humor, I was able to shed the racism I grew up with.

American Slavery Started with Blacks

The sad part of racism is that every human race has had it in some form. Thanks to a black writer, Alex Haley, and his movie, Roots, I even learned that while it was white men who brought the African slaves to the “New World,” it was blacks who sold the slaves to the whites in the first place.

And every race has practiced slavery. Even among Native Americans, there were tribes that took slaves from the defeated in their wars. Romans took slaves from the various tribes they defeated, including my Germanic ancestors. From the Christian Bible, we know that the ancient Egyptians took slaves. And, obviously, Africans took slaves from the tribes they defeated.

Hope for Societal Change toward Racism

One of my favorite new TV series is The Neighborhood, shows a black couple and a white couple working through integrating a formerly black neighborhood and shows racism in reverse where the racist is the black husband. This is a marvelously funny show, a marvelously human show.

Thus, my sadness watching people resorting to violence to get attention, and acting like the Pirates of the Caribbean, a Disneyland staple that has now lost its romantic luster for me. I realize that not all protesters felt only “Black lives matter,” though some of the protestors seem to convey that.

I have black friends and relatives that look to have some black blood who have personally experienced racism in America, especially by the police forces. Still, I would like to see some balance brought to the American black views. While they strive for “equality” in the business world and in American society, please remember the following:

• Not all white Americans live in high society either – I was born in a lower-class family, and despite getting a fantastic education due to the military, I am retired on social security and no sizeable savings either.
• It was whites who built the Underground Railroad to spirit black slaves to freedom in Canada.
• It was Northern white boys who fought their cousins in the South to give freedom to the blacks in America.
• It was a white president who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and a white Congress who made it law.

My point is that not all white Americans are racist. And not all racists are white.

Small Businesses Struggle Without Riots

Another point here is that I owned a small business for six years, so I really felt sorry for the brick and mortar small businesses I watched on TV being ripped off and even burned. The rioters have no empathy for others when they wreak havoc on a community.

Most of the small businesses I worked with as a consultant were barely surviving financially, yet they were providing jobs for many others in their cities and towns. Because of COVID-19 and the Internet, many small businesses were already fighting to make it until the economy opens up again. Being burned out or merely plundered may finish them off.

And, while I feel for all businesses during riots, I feel for small businesses even more because of how hard it is to be a small business today. From personal experience, I relate to that challenge to survive, so I was delighted to see Gretchen Schmid’s reported April 15, 2020, in her article, “Small Business Statistics: 19 Essential Numbers to Know (2020),” on Fundera.com:

From what I’ve seen in life, it is doubtful many of the rioters will care about the survival of the small businesses they attack. However, maybe they will feel more empathy for the employees who won’t have a job should their employer fail. Schmid also wrote: