After reading Kirsten's post, I also wondered if she had raised any children to be adults. If so, I don't think her comments would be the same.

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Kirsten, I take exception to your comments about race & poverty in and the Cindy Sheehan vigil. If I understood you correctly, you wrote that if a Black woman were to 'pull a Cindy' [i.e. camp outside the president's vacation home in an effort to meet with him to ask him why her child died in his war], she would be poor, with no saved to support her while she 'protested', and therefore she would lose her low wage job...Also, I gathered from your comments that this hypothetical Black "Cindy Sheehan" would have to bring her other underaged children along and those children would then be in danger of being taken from her by child welfare department [that is to say they would be more in danger of this response than any underage White children would be].

I'm sure that Kirsten must know that there are African Americans who are very economically well off and there are African Americans who have the financial resources to take a month's vacation with or without pay to do what they feel is important to do.

Also, Black folks do have families who would be willing to take care of their under age children if they decided to do something that might get ugly [as I pray won't happen with Cindy Sheehan's vigil].

So okay I get that Kirsten is being hypothetical-What if Cindy Sheehan were Black? Would she be such a powerful symbol of a mother's love [my words] or would she have been allowed to set up her camp, or would she have been quickly arrested and any underage children who she might have brought with her be put under the custody of child welfare?.

My response to these hypthetical questions is remember the press is and Internet bloggers are closely watching and recording what is going on at Camp Casey. If Cindy Sheehan had been Black AND had started the Gold Star Mothers for Peace group AND was a blogger on dailykos and other political websites, and had asked for other parents whose sons and daughters were killed in Iraq to join her in Crawford, and had asked other veterans to join her too, ...if all that were the same and if the police would have done a Rambo on her, then her race might have been a plus factor in the amount of media coverage and public outrage that she [this hypothetical Black Cindy Sheehan] would then receive.

But that's alot of 'ifs'...

Besides, there is an implication that in 2005 the police in Crawford would treat a Black woman and Black children differently than they would treat a White woman and White children. I believe that the presence of the media there watching and recording what is happening would mean that the police couldn't get away with differential treatment based on race, even if they wanted to do so...

And even if individual members of the Crawford, Texas police department don't believe in equality among the races, I would hope that they have been trained to treat any person the same way, regardless of their race or ethnicity...

Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one....



Azizi