Messed Up America

--Fifty years ago this week, the Little Rock Nine desegregated the high
school in Little Rock, Arkansas. News footage replayed this week included a
clip of a school-aged white girl in cat-eye glasses hissing unforgettably
at a reporter, "Niggers should stay in their own schools!"




--There is a tree at the high school in Jena, Alabama, that social norms have
decided black kids are not allowed to sit under. I'm talking about today,
in 2007. When the black kids decided to sit under the tree anyway, the
white kids responded by hanging several hangman's nooses from the tree's
limbs. An altercation ensued and in the aftermath six blacks were charged
with attempted murder. In the first trial, an all-white jury convicted a 16-year-old. He faces 22 years in prison. His alleged [attempted] murder weapon? A tennis shoe.



--Bill O'Reilly went to a black-owned restaurant in Harlem recently and said
he "couldn't get over the fact" there was no difference between the
black-run restaurant and any other eatery in NYC. "There wasn't any
craziness at all," he said. "No one said, Hey MF-er, bring me some iced
tea."



--A new study has found that black male job applicants with clean records are no more likely to get hired than white ex-convicts recently released from prison. The stats only get worse from there.



Somewhere in the midst of all these stories lies one truly messed up
America. How far have we come over the past 50 years? Really.