I have an unusual family. It’s multiracial. The skin of my grandchildren ranges from dark to fair! (None, by the way, is adopted.) Like most grandmothers, I utterly adore all of them. However, according to Black Lives Matter (BLM), at this juncture, only my black grandchildren are worth a cracker. Yet all the grandchildren are siblings and cousins, who (most of the time) love each other! When they see BLM signs, what are they supposed to think?

Can my black grandchildren now demand an apology for the systemic racism that BLM considers inherent in their white brothers?  Can they claim more treats as reparation? Should my white grandchildren, bow low as their black siblings enter the room? Try to systematize that agenda and all hell will break loose. What about the children who are neither the one nor the other, but in the middle? Or, even if their skin is dark, what if they identify as white -- and vice versa. How would the Supreme Court textualize that? Are their parents (my children) supposed to favor the dark over the light, during this newest, fashionable iteration of the racist slur?

And what of their grandfather’s history -- from a (very) black Ghanaian clan, some members of which, one or two centuries ago, procured slaves to sell to the white traders? Perhaps my black grandchildren should apologize to themselves for their bipolar heritage, before they sanctimoniously insist on the right to possess their white brothers’ laptops! Does this place a double burden on the white grandkids -- with two slave legacies -- the wholesalers and the retailers? Perhaps they ought to hand over all their toys as retribution.

It is after all about consumer goods, isn’t it? Racial equality for BLM, means the equal distribution of Nikes, diamond studs, expensive watches, flashy gold chains, multiple guns, fast cars, new technological devices, nice houses, and now, it seems, gold teeth. Never mind having to get a tiresome education and skills to procure a decent income -- even with an affirmative action leg up. And it was for the identical purpose that the West Africans sold their own into slavery. They coveted European manufactured goods.

I reared my children to be colorblind and proud of their mixed heritage. I did not reckon on political revenge. Even in South Africa, which has long since eliminated the appalling official apartheid policy of racial segregation, revenge is now sought against the remaining white farmers. The latter have been cultivating their land for centuries. Yet, if they manage to escape the extraordinary white farmer homicide rate, (winked at by South Africa’s corrupt government and deliberately fudged over by the woke MSM), their future still looks bleak. The desire for revenge, it seems, has a moving horizon. It never ends.

The tragic consequence of BLM will be the continual impoverishment of inner-city black children who have never been taught values that can lift them out of misery. Welfare handouts reward broken families and fatherless children are overrepresented as imprisoned, underachieving and self-destructive -- like George Floyd. Meanwhile, BLM is busy agitating to demolish the family unit entirely in the name of pulling down the patriarchy, (which over the last 2,000 years gave us the greatest civilization ever built.) Yet, there are many successful, specifically tailored, pedagogical programs around the world which have lifted children out of intergenerational poverty. The global billionaires are uninterested. They prefer to fund revolution, not education and the wealthy are falling over themselves to finance BLM.

BLM’s binary choice foists upon us a partisan ideology, which pervades the entire progressing-to-pandemonium Left. It’s a false, vindictive narrative of inherent, systemic white racism is parasitical. Once inside the bloodstream it proliferates, setting the body politic at war with itself.  The multiracial family is a microcosm of this macro-level assault.

As the chief (and outnumbered) representative in my own family, personifying (in my white skin),  the vile, systemically-privileged, imperialist, neocolonial, empire-mongering, white race, believe me, I know what it’s like to be an ethnic minority! On the other hand, the fact that I walked over hot coals to marry a very black Ghanaian back in that year of rebellion, 1968, would seem to put me in the non-racist camp? Nope. Only unquestioning genuflection to the current woke ideology will suffice.

Rational, broad-based historical inquiry, which would free the enslaved minds of the black and white sheep population, has been tossed overboard for craven fealty to slogans, myths, and symbols, by the very white sheep who are its targets. They acquiesce to their own demise.  A few weeks ago, a local realtor lost her job for removing a BLM placard! She has apologized. The company has apologized, and the dangerous racist pantomime continues.  

This calamitous education deficit may prove to be our lethal sarcoma. Even the sciences are spotted with malignant tumors. The worthy Hillsdale College model needs nationwide replication, so that once again we can stand with MLK, acknowledging the importance of character over color and the civilized, broadly educated, human spirit over a pair of looted Nikes. From the perspective of outer space, we are a single multicultural family! The ignorance of one, injures us all!

Never mind. I’ll just go back to writing my memoir. Apologies for imposing an old grandmother’s grief.