Is it that serious

When I read about Peter Ratener, a community college math instructor in Bellevue, Wash., who asked a question on one of his test that read, “Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300 — foot Federal Building and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second when would the watermelon hit the ground?” I was outraged. Not because the question seemed racially charged, but because I read further and apparently some black community leaders in the Seattle area are demanding Ratener’s termination, suspension, or that he be disciplined. My God, I thought, look at my people playing the race card once again.
I don’t understand it, it’s like black people must tack on a racially motivated issue to every problem they must deal with outside their race and just because Ratener used the name Condoleezza, doesn’t mean he was necessarily making reference to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
People are calling it an issue of racism because they view it as a caricature toward blacks from apparently always eating watermelon during the slave era. But realistically, so what if a lot of blacks eat watermelon or did eat a lot of watermelon, so do a lot of whites. We eat it and whites sell it to us on the sides of the roads and that’s just the way it is. And for all we know Rice eats it too, probably in her office, which is located in a federal building.
If Ratener would have re- worded the question and said something like, “George Bush holds a jar mayonnaise just over the edge of the 50 foot white house-” and he would have been black, would white America have demanded his resignation, or termination? No, they would have shaken their heads, called us some no count niggers and kept on with their business. But, because this is a black person who happens to hold a prominent position it’s unacceptable to poke fun. That’s utterly nonsensical. The professor ultimately apologized, for what I don’t know, but he did, and yet, black leaders still aren’t satisfied. It’s almost as though we are sitting at home with our armor waiting for a fight or some other reason to march.
Stop playing the race card every single time something small happens or eventually when we will need to play that card people are going to look at us and say, “They always do that,” and continue to ignore us just the same. It’s just like the boy who cried wolf, he cried until he lost his credibility. Is that the fate daunting in the future of the black race, at this rate we must be close if we haven’t lost it ready.
Some things are racially motivated, yes, but not everything. We get mad when we are stereotyped but there are some stereotypes that we actually hold true to. We listen to loud obnoxious music, walk around with our pants sagging below our waste, wear oversized clothes, and speak improper English, to name a few accurate stereotypes. We do all these things but yet we accuse white people of making it all up. There is a difference between being stereotyped and being faced with reality-the reality is, we are guilty of the stereotypes.
If I were Ratener, I wouldn’t apologize, I would stand by what may have been a rather colorful question, but legitimate nonetheless and if I were those black leaders, I would go find another cause, because this one isn’t worth fighting.