I Know Best. Roger L. Simon

FREEMAN: Why not? Do you want one?

       WALLACE: No, no.

       FREEMAN: I don’t either. I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.

       WALLACE: How are we going to get rid of racism until . . . ?

       FREEMAN: Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You’re not going to say, “I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.” Hear what I’m saying?

      I hear what Morgan was saying. I hear it loud and clear and, as an old sixties civil rights worker, it brings tears to my eyes, because, the way things are going now, that simple wisdom from one of America’s finest actors makes 2005 seem ages ago, some distant century or, at least, BBO—Before Barack Obama. Or, more exactly, before Obama, Eric Holder, the New Black Panthers, and the Philadelphia polling place, Henry Louis Gates, and the Cambridge police (“Beer Summit” over nothing), Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman (“If I had a son he would look like Travyon”), Michael Brown and the Ferguson police, Eric Garner and the Staten Island police, Bill de Blasio and the NYPD, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” “Black Lives Matter,” Al Sharpton with the president of the United States, Al Sharpton with the mayor of the City of New York, Al Sharpton with the president of Sony Pictures, Al Sharpton everywhere as if the race-baiting ideologue were the arbiter of American social behavior of almost any sort, our contemporary Emily Post. (He was even praised by the mayor of Bridgeport for “fighting the good fight on climate change.”¹) And finally, “What do you want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now.”