Who was it that called me tar baby? I don't remember, my cousin maybe although I am not sure. Yes, Sambo's was an OK coffeehouse as far as food goes, a lot like Denny's, but the pictures on the walls were sort of a problem, very controversial if you stop to think about it long enough. I remember eating there as a child and seeing the pictures right out of a book that I read somewhere. Hmmm...
Well, my understanding of the story at a young age is not exactly the same thing as the NAACP opinion of Sambo's. Still, I cannot say that the disappearance of Sambo's is a bad thing. I am not really interested in being a book burning activist but also there is no overwhelming reason to rescue the story of Sambo from the oblivion of history.
Anyway, this is not an issue that I choose to crusade about, not being a crusader, at least not that kind of crusader. There are those who sued to get rid of Sambo's pictures painted all over the walls and their purpose was accomplished through various means, whether by legal or political means. So I am not going to criticize them for doing that even though it was not my issue in a personal sense. It was because those pictures inspired by colonial times do keep things stirred up in a racial sense.
Nevertheless, I need to remind everyone that I personally am not a tar baby and my name is not Sambo. It is not about me. I personally have no real connection to the issue of colonialism, a historical era that was pretty much over by World War II.
That said, I would argue for a more moderated view of colonialism as a product of its time and place in history and not necessarily bad in every sense of the word, something that despite its glaring mistakes was nevertheless the vehicle that God used to open the door for missionaries who took the gospel of Jesus Christ to people who would otherwise be as unsaved and hopeless as they ever were for centuries.
We cannot have the ignorant high-school dropout cousins running the history show. Most of the most vocal critics of historical colonialism are not even really Christians and have no clue what is in the Bible. They are clueless about what it meant.
