The Light-Skin Trigger: The Black Woman's ''Kryptonite''

By Clarence E. Freeman

The Nonsagacious Saga of the Fourth Monkey

President Reagan was reportedly born in 1911. He had plenty of time to read about the outrages committed against black people during his lifetime and afterward. Either he didnt read the papers between then and now or he chose to ignore what he read. Virtually all the outrages committed, as outlined in this book to me personally and millions of other black citizens during that lifetime, including the lynching, burning of blacks out of their homes by night riders, the rapes of black women and girls, the killings of blacks who tried to vote, and other atrocities too numerous to mention, he, apparently, has chosen to ignore. This says nothing about the forcible segregation in virtually all facets of American life. He lived over ninety years; what was he doing all this time that he didnt notice all the evil and viciousness inflicted on black Americans?
The experiences, which I had personally outlined here, constitute a virtual treasure trove of bigotry. Perhaps God has asked him what he was doing all this timethat is, besides trying to curry favor for political purposes with bigoted whites in the South and nationwide by extolling the supposed virtues of states rights while totally ignoring the rights of black citizens, and by complaining about forced busing and affirmative action. Didnt he consider it forced busing when white students were bused past black schools and black students were bused past white schools in order to enforce racial segregation while wasting much gasoline in the process? Did he disdain affirmative action when white people were the beneficiaries of preferential treatment (and largely, still are)? Whites in this country have never been placed in a disadvantageous position compared with any other group. The reason being that they were usually the ones in control, and most of them, likely, are not masochistic.
Wasnt he concerned about the individual rights of black people? He was apparently an advocate of the three-monkey approach: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. He further practiced the fourth-monkey philosophy: acknowledge no evil. According to columnist Bob Herbert, Reagan was opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. Reagan also, in 1988, vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation, which Congress overrode. He also vetoed the impositions of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, which Congress also overrode. Herbert says there is no way todays scribes can clean up this record. So despite almost four hundred years of slavery, denial of the right to vote, lynching, beatings, wholesale rape of black women and girls, segregation, and every other cruelty, President Reagan held that there is no discrimination in America. The most ironic thing is that even after denying the existence of discrimination in this country, he himself was one of its foremost practitioners. He was suppressing blacks justice with one hand while currying favor with bigoted Southern whites with the other by going to the scene of the murders of three civil rights workers and assuring the populace that he will stand with you against the blacks.
In their zeal to keep blacks in their place, many whites in this country will elect anyone who promises to make their dreams of black subjugation come true, blatantly or surreptitiously. This is how we got in the current mess in Washington. Perhaps Reagan should have turned up his moral hearing aid and taken off his moral blinders. Im sure that by now, God has made plain the price of perverting his will. Reagan had over ninety years to do the right t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462809257

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Clarence E. Freeman.

Cover art by Frank Roosa

Library of Congress Control Number:   2008910827

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4363-8820-7

             Softcover     978-1-4363-8819-1

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CONTENTS

About the Author

Book Summary

Introduction

Foreword

PART 1

Chapter

1 Lowlights of My Federal Career: An Uncivil Disservice (An Interactive Exercise)

2 A Tale of Two Women: One Literally Bites the Feeding Hand

3 Grandma Rickety-Bones: The Spindly Legged Semitoothless Dried-up Old Prune of a Churchgoing Bigot

4 Taxonomy 101: Proboscis Maximus Africanus: It's All about the Dolls

5 Just Meddling The African American Mix Master

6 Sharing the Yoke: The Making of an Introvert

7 Plumbing the Depths of Idiocy: The Mouth-to-Brain Disconnect

8 Female Slaves: The Plantation Owners' Sexual Candy Store

9 Will the Real Christian Church Please Stand Up?

PART 2

A Crock of Religious CRAP (Churchmen Ratifying Abominable Prejudice)

Foreword

Chapter

10 Laboring Under A Misnomer

11 Eureka! (I Found It)

12 The Indictment: A Symphony of Absurdities and Theological Crocks

13 The New and Improved Religion (or I've Been Lying All These Years)

14 That Old Black Magic

15 Unforbidden Fruit or a Bad Case of Myopia

16 On Poor, Helpless Negroes versus Bishop Who?

17 Give Me That Old-Time, Hang-Fire Religion!

18 The Winners and Still Champions!

19 Are You One Too? (Or Take Off That Bedsheet and Hood and Give Me Some Skin, Cuz)

20 It's All in How You Slice It

21 Uniformed Bigots

Bibliography

About the Artist

The centerpiece of a trilogy of bigotry.

A black man honors a naturally blond, light-complexioned African American woman with holy matrimony and encounters

H . . . E . . . DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS in nosiness and bigotry, most unexpectedly, from at least one relative and members of his own church.

Three memoirs on racism and bigotry by Clarence E. Freeman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Born in the Campostella section of Norfolk, Virginia, in December 1939, at 1509 Selden Street, with a preattached umbilical cord, which my mother, who played a substantive role in my birth, so thoughtfully allowed me to borrow and which I, promptly and carelessly, misplaced. This proved that only responsible adults should be entrusted with so important a device, the loose end of which, after detachment from the sponsoring parent, should be tastefully tucked into the waistband of one's skirt or trousers to avoid the likelihood of its being stepped on by passers-by or caught in subway doors in the commuters' rush.

Graduate of Booker T. Washington High School, Norfolk, Virginia, June 1957. Attended Virginia Union University, Richmond, Virginia, 1957-1958. Military experience: all served with a congenital physical disability (hypothyroidism) U.S. Army ROTC, from the fall of 1958 to spring of 1960.

Subjects studied: individual weapons and marksmanship, map reading, crew-served weapons, close-order drill, battle group formation, drill and ceremonies, military history, United States Marine Corps Reserve from December 1956 to December 1962 (overlapped with ROTC from 1958 to 1960).

Subjects studied and practiced: operation and maintenance of individual weapon (U.S. Rifle, caliber .30, M1), close-order drill, first aid, hand-to-hand combat, infantry small-unit tactics, operation and preventive maintenance of 2 1/2-ton truck, supply operations (classroom lecture on documentation) and warehouse work, utilizing forklift trucks, amphibious assault, and drill and ceremonies. Qualified as Marksman with the M-1 rifle each of six years.

Active duty for training during summers: Camp Le Jeune, North Carolina, in 1957, 1959, and 1961; Marine Corps Supply Center, Albany, Georgia, in 1958 and 1960; and Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Virginia, in 1962. The treatment of hypothyroidism, by prescription since September 1970, proves the military did not provide a satisfactory physical for someone expected to engage in strenuous activity over a period of several years (1956-1962), despite suffering from a lack of stamina, and they were primarily interested in having just a warm, breathing body. Needless to say, I struggled more than many others who were not so afflicted.

Graduate of Norfolk Division of Virginia State College (which is now Norfolk State University), Norfolk, Virginia, with BS degree in business administration (1964).

Employed by the U.S. Navy 1964 to retirement in 1994, at grades GS-5 to GS-11, after holding the following positions: management analyst, supply systems analyst, supervisory supply systems analyst, general supply specialist, supervisory general supply specialist, assistant terminal area security officer (computer security), equal employment opportunity counselor, equal employment opportunity committeeman, and chairman of department safety committee. In addition, I performed periodic area inspections for security, safety, and housekeeping violations for the commanding officers, always a navy captain or admiral. During a large part of the time in which I worked for the navy, it will be shown that, especially during the early years, the navy worked against me. It was apparently a skin-tone issue. How dare I look like that? Employed as supervisor of quality control at two different activities for a total of approximately six years.

Required on occasion, at first federal installation, to accompany driver on trips to the incinerator to certify the destruction of classified documents and materials by burning them.

Was also required at second installation to inventory unfit subsistence loaded on multiple pallets from warehouse storage areas and accompany shipments to the landfill in Hampton, Virginia, and witness and certify, in writing, their destruction.

Married to current wife since December 1973, owned and rode a 750-cc Honda motorcycle from the age of forty-two to the age of fifty-eight.

Father of a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, a son who is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and previously piloted a C-17 transport aircraft, age forty-one, who is married, with a son and daughter, and a wife who is pursuing an advanced degree. A daughter, age thirty-nine, who is married and received undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Virginia is herself married to a physician from Ghana, Africa, who practices internal medicine and is a practicing obstetrician/gynecologist in Charlotte, North Carolina. The couple has two sons and a daughter. A son, twenty-seven, who graduated with honors in English from Norfolk State University in May 2004, is single and is currently employed in the home-furnishings industry and plays electric guitar in a band.

A stepson, aged forty-four, lives in the state of North Carolina and works for the Department of Corrections.

Hobbies: a firearms enthusiast. Presently maintains a permit to carry concealed pistols in the state of Virginia and own pistols in the following calibers: .22 Long Rifle; .22 Magnum; .32 semiautomatic; .380 semiautomatic; .9 millimeter semiautomatic; and a .45 ACP semiautomatic in addition to a .30 caliber military carbine and an abundant supply of ammunition for all. On October 25, 2007, there was a man attacked within a mile from my house and was severely cut several times with a knife while resisting a robbery by two men who flagged him down causing him to stop, thinking they needed assistance.

A few days later, a deputy sheriff was robbed while escorting a female acquaintance to her apartment. He was robbed of his badge and other property. This was also near my neighborhood. I intend to protect me and mine! I recall, vividly, being struck in the mouth and knocked to the ground by a group of thugs on the grounds of my high school one night in September 1954 at the age of fourteen, at a bonfire, and suffering a loosened tooth and split lip. Afterward, they stood there laughing. I resolved thereafter that when I became able to protect myself, I would obtain the means legally to prevent its happening again, making attacking me a hazardous occupation during which any future attacker would not find reason to laugh, but rather call for his mother if he is able. Anyone who attacks strangers for no reason on a public street deserves no less. As the expression goes, I'll bust a cap on you.

I have received literature from a national firearms organization soliciting my membership, but I refuse to join or support any organization having members, some of whom advocate the extermination of racial, religious, or other minorities and certainly wouldn't welcome me. I can defend myself without joining their group, thank you!

Other passions: listening to sacred and classical music played on a pipe organ, visiting natural history museums to view animal fossils and mummies (even at the risk of being accused of acting white), and touring large cities on foot. Sometime ago, I realized that talking to other people about my interests, largely African Americans, produced faraway stares of boredom and a bit of embarrassment for me. Usually, when I attend these concerts, there are anything from zero to six African Americans in the audience, which is surprising, considering the number of African American music students and faculty in my area. I have seen only one African American performer in concert, and he happens to be the nephew of a high school classmate of mine.

BOOK SUMMARY

The Nonsagacious Saga of the Fourth Monkey

President Reagan was reportedly born in 1911. He had plenty of time to read about the outrages committed against black people during his lifetime and afterward. Either he didn't read the papers between then and now or he chose to ignore what he read. Virtually all the outrages committed, as outlined in this book to me personally and millions of other black citizens during that lifetime, including the lynching, burning of blacks out of their homes by night riders, the rapes of black women and girls, the killings of blacks who tried to vote, and other atrocities too numerous to mention, he, apparently, has chosen to ignore. This says nothing about the forcible segregation in virtually all facets of American life. He lived over ninety years; what was he doing all this time that he didn't notice all the evil and viciousness inflicted on black Americans?

The experiences, which I had personally outlined here, constitute a virtual treasure trove of bigotry. Perhaps God has asked him what he was doing all this time---that is, besides trying to curry favor for political purposes with bigoted whites in the South and nationwide by extolling the supposed virtues of states' rights while totally ignoring the rights of black citizens, and by complaining about forced busing and affirmative action. Didn't he consider it forced busing when white students were bused past black schools and black students were bused past white schools in order to enforce racial segregation while wasting much gasoline in the process? Did he disdain affirmative action when white people were the beneficiaries of preferential treatment (and largely, still are)? Whites in this country have never been placed in a disadvantageous position compared with any other group. The reason being that they were usually the ones in control, and most of them, likely, are not masochistic.

Wasn't he concerned about the individual rights of black people? He was apparently an advocate of the three-monkey approach: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. He further practiced the fourth-monkey philosophy: acknowledge no evil. According to columnist Bob Herbert, Reagan was opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. Reagan also, in 1988, vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation, which Congress overrode. He also vetoed the impositions of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, which Congress also overrode. Herbert says there is no way today's scribes can clean up this record. So despite almost four hundred years of slavery, denial of the right to vote, lynching, beatings, wholesale rape of black women and girls, segregation, and every other cruelty, President Reagan held that there is no discrimination in America. The most ironic thing is that even after denying the existence of discrimination in this country, he himself was one of its foremost practitioners. He was suppressing blacks' justice with one hand while currying favor with bigoted Southern whites with the other by going to the scene of the murders of three civil rights workers and assuring the populace that he will stand with you against the blacks.

In their zeal to keep blacks in their place, many whites in this country will elect anyone who promises to make their dreams of black subjugation come true, blatantly or surreptitiously. This is how we got in the current mess in Washington. Perhaps Reagan should have turned up his moral hearing aid and taken off his moral blinders. I'm sure that by now, God has made plain the price of perverting his will. Reagan had over ninety years to do the right thing. Somehow, he couldn't seem to find the time. Ignoring everything that happened after the first boatload of slaves was unloaded at Jamestown and considering it a fluke is the height of myopia.

I can't help but think that every unrepentant slave owner and slave catcher has died and gone to eternal damnation. Our Creator has issued his Commandment, Thou shalt not steal, yet these people defied his edict on a daily basis by kidnapping and stealing the labor of slaves and starting a war to continue this travesty.

Among the most notable of these is a former president of the United States who is mocked every year with his birthday being celebrated with the sale of bedsheets and bloomers. Nothing can change the fact that he held Africans---and later, African Americans---captive and forced them to labor without compensation, regardless of the number of flags and bunting in front of which he stood. Furthermore, I believe any number of other presidents, politicians, and judges met the same fate due to similar offenses, no matter how much they are celebrated in the history books. Several centuries is a long time for weeping and moaning with no end in sight and, as the Bible describes it, the gnashing of teeth. They can't say they weren't warned. Had I lived then, he or they might have enslaved me. I can imagine El Presidente looking down on the commercialization of his birthday and exclaiming as the actor William Bendix used to say in his role in the radio program, The Life of Riley, back in the forties, What a revoltin' development this is.

INTRODUCTION

Consider these true stories to be my satirical crayon marks on the walls of life. Go ahead and call me the less-mustachioed (minus the handlebars), satirical, much-darker version of Salvador Dali. He's one of my idols.

There are far too many bigoted, intrusive, nosy, and black-man-insulting old (and young) black women with nasty attitudes, especially in church. It's time someone told them about themselves. Since I'm the most recent black man, of which I'm aware, who has been victimized by some people of this type, I volunteer. I'm sick and tired of going to church, looking for a worshipful experience and finding one that is irritating, and grating on the nerves, from comments made by some old woman with a perpetually puckered puss that are ill thought out.

Another self-pitying, decrepit, intrusive, and bigoted old black woman disrespects and traumatizes a black man in the presence of his wife, having just come out of church, just because she, the old woman, didn't like the complexion of his first wife. Neither the author nor his current wife knew who this old woman was or had even seen her previously. This story is the second part and centerpiece of this trilogy. If being sprayed by a skunk will make a woman undesirable, ranking as a 10 on the undesirable scale, being self-pitying with bigoted nastiness will rank as at least a 12 in my estimation. When black women such as this see a black man with a black woman with a complexion lighter than their own (or, heaven forbid, a Caucasian woman), their faces and mouths begin to pucker as though they have just ingested an entire barrel of sour pickles, and their corneas turn red and accentuate their perpetually puckered pusses. (Please note that this word contains no i's and refers to faces.)

In the first part of the trilogy, read how the author, working for the U.S. Navy as an analyst, determining manpower (person power) staffing requirements in material handling and warehousing and office spaces, solved a problem for which he wasn't even assigned to find a solution, using highly abstract and theoretical thinking to develop time standards for various materials handling operations, only to discover that his standards were being used to schedule workload staffing and evaluate employee effectiveness in virtually all the storage areas while no one, including his supervisor, asked him how he did it or acknowledged his efforts. Instead, he continually received verbal complaints about not talking enough and committing verbal infractions on such other things that could not be proved or disproved, such as The supervisors say they can't understand you, and was, subsequently, transferred to another branch where he experienced even worse racist treatment. The office was finally cleansed of the first and only black person. Sometimes, I feel as though God Himself has used these bigots described in this book and their attitudes to reward me, through their actions, by giving me the ability to realize my long-term desire to become a successful author. Sometimes, one doesn't have to search for an opportunity, but simply look around. It may already be standing there, staring one in the face. This is the story of several of these, about which I chose to write rather than stew.

This is the book about which to tell all your friends and neighbors. Read your copy, and you'll agree. It's the author's true personal experiences with bigotry of all shades and nearly all sources, including his federal government employment, lasting almost thirty years. The antics of the author's alter ego, Brutus, the rectifier (literally, if you'll pardon the pun), the dog from Hades, made it a biting satire!

It's all in here! The junkyard dog of satire of Tidewater, Virginia, chomps into and chews the rumps and takes hefty bites out of the hindmost parts of all manner of bigots, black and white---including mean, nosy, and bigoted old black women (especially those in church, who attack verbally and assault the self-esteem of black men since these men constitute low-hanging fruit, being readily available) and race-baiting men of the cloth---spewing virulent hatred of blacks and passing it off as the will of God, while themselves holding blacks in bondage, preaching inside edifices, standing in pulpits, and preaching racism to parishioners seated in pews many of which were hewn by slave labor.

Due to his lacking in the area of appropriate dentition, the author gets his alter ego, Brutus, who is fully equipped in that regard, featuring four-inch serrated canine teeth, to rectify the attitudes of bigots and redirect their behavior to the author's liking. (Hey! He's my dog!)

Don't even think about drinking a mint julep around him or let him hear you say ptui, chaw, or y'all.

Also revealed is the practice of certain founding fathers and other governmental figures who were SOB's (slave-owning bigots---that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!) even SRB's (slave-raping bigots).

A nineteenth-century U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that slaves were property of their masters and, thusly, had no right to escape. (Hey, you! Chest of drawers! Piece of furniture! Cuckoo clock! Brass bed! Y'all had better come back here! Chaw! Chaw! Ptuii!) I wonder: What type of property were they considered? Were they plant and equipment? This category requires, in order to stand up, either a bottom that determines a geometric plane or at least three legs. Were they livestock? The only livestock found in this country has four legs or has two legs in the case of fowl. Did the court bother to check these slaves for feathers? Did they consider them to be fruits or vegetables, and did they check them for leaves or husks?

These are the very least considerations that someone who matriculated through college and a school of law should be able to ponder. This idiocy emanated from the highest court in the land. If these learned men were shown a series of colored balls, pieces of furniture, or several colors of crayons, they would all readily agree that each piece of whatever color of the said objects was---regardless of color---a ball, a chair or other piece of furniture, or a crayon.

But show these same people several human beings of different colors, and they immediately suffer a crisis of recognition, rendering them unable to discern that they all are human beings. The red-eyed, frothy-mouthed, heavily muscled, alligator-jawed, butt-chewing hellhound Brutus (scientific name: Masticatorus rumpii) goes bananas when I tell him some bigot called him Princess. I'll bet he gets a chance to tear several people a new one before this book is finished. It's rumored that Brutus is a holdover from the Jurassic period when his primitive mammalian ancestors preyed and feasted on carnivorous dinosaurs, but I wouldn't put too much stock in that.

It is also rumored that Brutus's lineage includes saber-toothed cats, resulting from some interspecies' hanky-panky indiscretions, not necessarily resulting from mixed marriage. I doubt that, but still, there's the matter of those teeth, which I can't get past.

On a recent television interview, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas stated that when he was a boy, his grandfather, who reared him, told him to never look a white woman in the eye. Strange things have happened in the United States of America. I once read an account of an incident where a black man was lynched because he accidentally brushed against a white woman who was passing him on the sidewalk. He was, allegedly, brutalized for not getting out of her way fast enough. Apparently, a black man was required to activate his ocular muscles and turn his corneas away in another direction to avert gazing at the white woman's eyes, even temporarily. What did these bigots fear? That the black man and the white woman would cast a spell on each other?

On the other side of the coin, it seems that, historically, slave owners and other white males had great difficulty in keeping their pants from falling down when in the presence of an attractive female slave or other black woman (or female child) even when the men were wearing a belt and suspenders. Yes, strange things have happened, here. These men of scant waist even included several presidents of the United States, many of whom came close to, literally, fathering their country. This doesn't even count the likelihood of unreported sexual assaults on male slaves, both men and boys, by male slave owners and other white males which did not and could not result in pregnancy, nor does it count the coerced sex from male slaves by white females who had given the ultimatum of You'll do it, or I'll tell my husband that you did.

THE LIGHT-SKIN TRIGGER: A black man pays a high emotional price for doing the right thing and marrying an African American woman with the wrong (light) complexion and hair color (natural blond) who befriended him after he was viciously attacked and injured by a woman with the right (dark) complexion, to whom he was initially attracted, when trying to show her an innocent sign of affection.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think so many uninvolved people would take an interest in my personal affairs, wanting to know why I married that light-skinned woman or thinking I owed them an explanation therefor.

The myriad of colors of skin, hair, and eyes of African Americans is due, mostly, to the coercive and forcible raping of female slaves and other black women over a period of almost four hundred years, resulting in the existence of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of light- and medium-complexioned blacks in America's living room, not to mention those of darker complexion who have genes of white American males in their makeup or genotype, which are not visible in their appearance or phenotype, but may manifest themselves in later generations, especially if these people mate with others with Caucasian-donated recessive genes.

One of the most recent manifestations of this is the revelation that a Caucasian United States Senator refused to admit he had given an African American woman his genes but had no qualms about getting into her mother's jeans. This subject is rarely discussed; unfortunately, this is an example of the unspeakable becoming the unmentionable. Apparently, the senator, like many other bigoted males of his time (and before and after his time), enjoyed getting into black women's unmentionables but couldn't bear being in the same restaurant, school, swimming pool, or church with them, not even (or especially not) if they brought along the senator's progeny to whom they had given birth.

Ironically, this senator ran for President of the United States, in 1948, on a platform of retaining segregation in order to get the support of white citizens, promising to keep blacks out of our schools, swimming pools, churches, etc., this, in a racially diverse country. Apparently, he didn't consider black people to be a part of us but some sort of alien beings.

This is prima facie evidence that bigoted white males would have no objection to mixing the races if blacks consisted only of females. At the time this occurred, during the mid-1920s, if any black man was seen to show an interest in the senator's daughter, even if his intentions were honorable, he was subject to disappear, maybe never to be seen again, alive or dead. This has been true many times, even in recent years, when the bodies of black men have been found in swamps---mutilated, tortured, and killed (floating or submerged)---because someone got the impression, whether rightly or