We never change, do we? No, no, no.-Cp

So I was sitting here in front of Molly (my oh-so-outdated-and-thus-temperamental-laptpm), doing journals for one of my English classes. And I was writing about Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Both were great writers during the Harlem Renaissance, but both had a profound dislike for the other. Hurston was a black woman who was outspoken, conservative, well-educated, and a loud proponent of the theory that each man should pull himself up by his own bootstraps, so to speak. Richard Wrihgt - like most black people of the day - was liberal, Communist, equally outspoken, and just as loud a proponent of the theory that the white man had disadvantaged - even crippled - the black man time and again, and so the latter was entitled to some help from the former along the way.

Here is where we take into account a brief bio of each. Hurston grew up in a small, self-governed community of intelligent and well-to-do black people. Wright grew up in an environment where prejudice surrounded him daily, and white people were always doing all things but helping black people.

Hurston and Wright, as I said before, never did like each other, and I think it is fairly easy to understand why. Anyhow, now that the lit lesson is out of the way, we go back to the recent past and me and Molly. So I was sitting here, trying to feign enough eloquence to convince my professor to give this set of journals an A, when I realized that this war that Hurston and Wright waged is not over.

I thought about affirmative action, and the perpetual debate over its rightness and its constitutionality, etc. It's essentially the same issue. And it's the same with reparations, and countless other elaborate government-instituted apologies to different groups of people it feels Uncle Sam has deeply wounded. I can't say what I really think either way, because I don't know what it is. When I look at what Hurston and Wright thought, I think each makes good points, and that each of their points of view makes perfect sense when their backgrounds are taken into account.
What continues to bug me, though, is the problem of trying to a nation of people to look past race lines and cultural differences when certain races and cultures continue to be "favored" by the government. Is paying me the price some slaveholder paid for my great-great-grandfather going to take away the stripes he had to endure? Of course not. But will it help me pay off some of my loan debt? Yes. Is one really relevant to the other? I'm not sure.
I have always had a pretty open mind, no matter how stubborn my mouth. So, I can marry him, a man from a totally different culture and race than mine, I can go to the school I do, where I am surrounded every day by people with very different upbringings and ways of thinking than I have, and have the rainbow-colored circle of close friends I have without (most of the time) thinking twice about it. In fact, I very rarely take real notice of our color differences, anyway.
I'm only askin because I wanna know how you...feel.-mb20
My point is that I don't think I will ever understand how the same American values that encourage us to look past color lines can simultaneously expect us to accept racial reparation laws of any kind. Any thoughts? Holla at me. I'm out.