Comments on: Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about race and racism will end

By: mboy

mboy — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:34:53 +0000

I love how some of the obviously white people on this board want to tell Freeman how he should feel. THEY know better, after all. Good grief.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 18:03:40 +0000

>Goodman- “We face racism of our own.”

Well, then THAT is something YOU can speak about from YOUR experience.

There’s a difference between ‘color blind’ and ‘color mute’.

By: Mike Goodman

Mike Goodman — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 13:48:46 +0000

I am a Euro-American male (46) and am unapologetic for racism and slavery. My family got here in 1900 from eastern Europe. I am Jewish. My history is that of “Fiddler on the Roof”. Haven’t seen it? You might want to. It’ the one where the Russian soldiers burn down our villages and rape our women.

My family got here like any immigrant family knowing no one and speaking no English. They worked as laborers and worked their way up to shop keeper. They learned English and saved money. My brothers and I went to college.

We faced rasicm of our own. After serving in WWII my uncle was denied entrance into college because: “We have enough Jews”. He was forced to change his name.

Look forls, Freeman said: “How are we going to get rid of racism? Stop talking about it!”

If you want to read into that, go ahead. I say it’s the cure. Dialogues like this are helpful and serve to heal (I hope), but in the long run our good kids have found a way to stop the nonsense.

I teach in a middle school (52% Euro-American, 25% black, the rest Asian, Hipanic). Kids are largely color blind. They sit with each other and giggle.

Two additional points: (1) they know what a THUG is and the good kids stay away from them. (2) Kids also frequently group up “by color”, but who’s that hurting?

Finally, I asked one bright African American kid, one time, if he had ever heard of the “achievement gap”. [It was in context of something else.]\

The long and short if it is that he hadn’t. He was too busy ACHIEVING to worry about the gap.

Any Blacks who want to to grow into the middle class should learn from the Whites and Hispanics and FROM OTHER BLACKS who just put their nose to the grindstone and WORK.

Does any of this mean I am going to have a RAINBOW coalition in my home? Probably not. But that, too, is okay. I have my situation, you have yours.

Maybe our kids will do better.

By: Ridwan (South Africa)

Ridwan (South Africa) — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 09:45:54 +0000

Freeman is a confused brother. His role in the movie “The Power of One” was just simply apalling. See the movie. Watch this “wizened” brother support a white English speaking boy to a “saviour” for downtrodden black South Africans. What was Freeman thinking? I would remind the brother that Dubois remarked that it was not the name/label that counts but “it is the THING” that counts. Dubois was telling us that no matter how we delude ourselves with name changes, or ignoring labels, the “THING that counts” is structural racism. Racism is a lived reality not a semantic delusion. Freeman’s ignorant statements tells me he has learned well from the white-liberal community that sustains him.

By: clark

clark — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:07:33 +0000

half-thought - truly.

stop talking about it.

Ha!

come on, man.

You stop talking about it and eventually it becomes taboo to talk about it…then it regains power that has been stripped by all of the “talking about it” that has been done over the past 50 years.

no, we need to keep talking about it - but talk about it where it is - and drag it out into the light where we can kick it around…and around and around and around until it really IS no longer the status quo.

By: Morgan Christ

Morgan Christ — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:22:10 +0000

I think Freeman’s sadly mistaken liberal White guilt for honest respect, and has confused all his subsequent roles as the magic negro/God with reality for Joe non-White Average.

By: dingo

dingo — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:45:28 +0000

If you have a friend who is black or white, why would you introduce him/her as your “black/white” friend? If you were describing a person that you didnt know, of what value would it be to add or to identify him/her as a “black/white” person?

I agree that sometimes it IS necessary to use race as a descriptor, e.g., if someone committed a crime and you needed a description of that person. But otherwise, of what value is it to know of someone’s race?

I’m with Mr. Freeman, if the situation doesnt warrant it, why bother? When do we get to the part about the “human race?”

By: andre

andre — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:26:12 +0000

Morgan Freeman is correct you can simply STOP labeling people to STOP racism. Key word STOP, we will not end it because it’s the human nature to become insecure about other people when they are better than others. This is where my opinion takes. Freeman talked about ending racism, but I say it wont end because people were not mant to not be insecure. Example, if a black guy bought a new expensive mp3 player people at school is going to criticize him. People will be jealous and they will say things that are not true, like he stole the money, he sold drugs to get money or he jumped someone and took the player. This all being said because people don’t know that he worked for months to get it. They rather assume that. Coming back to the topic ” black history month”, showing people that black people are people to and that they don’t deserve all the bad credit will not change the people’s opinion about them. Different people make up a community, and different communities make countries.

If you agree please email me back at andreisevil666@hotmail.com

By: Lyonside

Lyonside — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 14:55:50 +0000

I agree. I’ve heard Freeman’s type of comments before, and I think the point is, to not make “race” or ethnicity the definition of a person. If you’re pointing out someone to a friend, or telling a story, there’s rarely a reason to say, “That black man over there is my chiropractor” or “So the black man said to me..” Unless, of course, that is the only characteristic that sets the person in question apart. In Freeman’s case, I’d say he’s also talking about color-blind casting and stereotypical roles.

I really think you should cast the best ACTOR for a role, not the best *insert race* for the role. With the obvious exception that if something is historical, and/or people are supposed to biologically related, etc., color-blind casting that disregards all laws of genetics and known history can be distracting.

That said, I have to say that sometimes some initially odd casting can be made to work. Case in point: I’ve had people object to Branaugh’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” in which Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves play brothers. But wait, they are half-brothers, and from Italy in the 1600s. There is no real reason that the two characters’ father could not been (at least part) or could not have married a Moor (as Washington’s character’s mother), and the perceived ethnic differences would add a deeper layer to the hatred and contempt that Reeves’ villian has for his favored half-brother. Will would have likely approved

By: R.U.BLIND?

R.U.BLIND? — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 02:14:11 +0000

HELLO?!
DID ANYONE READ JOHN’S & JK’S COMMENTS???????????????????
FREEMAN’S “DON’T TALK ABOUT IT” STATEMENT WAS EITHER AN INCOMPLETE QUOTE OR AN INCOMPLETE THOUGHT.