CALLER: I’m 90 years old and I just wanted to ask the colored man, why don’t colored people instead of saying what we did to them, why don’t they say what we did for them? They talk about the slavery but since then they have been given welfare, free medicine, free everything.
HARLESTON: Ma’am I think this is more of a conversation about the relationship between the administration and the people on Wall Street and not necessarily one that’s based on race.
CALLER: Oh, okay. I’m not a racist. That was my comment. Thank you.
Wow. Assuming the caller was in fact 90, she were born in 1920. She would have been in her 40s during the civil rights era. Did she really miss the whole era between the end of slavery and the beginning of the civil rights era? Was she unaware of the culture of institutionalized racism that existed for the first half of her life? And the whole we-they thing is creepy. But she says she isn’t a racist so that makes me feel better.
