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BOOK REVIEW          MURPHY

It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six, or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught."

The Prince George's County school busing debacle is just one of those areas where this song applies. The awful thing is that a whole white generation has repeated the divisive role of racism and hate to such an extent that regardless of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, regardless of the 1964 Civil Rights legislation, Governor Marvin Mandel is still the opportunist of old, pandering to the fears of bigots, while he plans spending public funds on building new schools under the guise of lessening busing, which Prince George's County educators say are unnecessary.

The recent book by Claude M. Lightfoot, Racism and Human Survival, Lessons of Nazi Germany for Today's World, deals with the methods used in the East German Democratic Republic's (GDR) education system, whereby children are being re-taught history in the sense that the racist Aryan--anti-Semitic--superiority during the Hitler years can no longer be tolerated in a growing country.

The rise to power of Hitler, desperately using racism to further his global dominance, to place blame for all the ills of Germany on the six million or more Jews, subsequently murdered in Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, surely is an adequate example to us that the present racism carried to that extreme in this country will develop into destruction of blacks in genocidal proportions, as witness the cuts in welfare, housing for the poor, medical care, even to the extent that victims of sickle cell anemia will be strictured as to marriage, insurance, job opportunities.

The fact, as defined in Lightfoot's book, that a country committed to the proposition that the evils and destruction of such racist philosophy must be reversed lends credence to a movement in this country, that we too can do the same. 

Lightfoot reveals, after his exhaustive tour through both East and West Germany: "The GDR has built a social system predicated

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 17:51:47