Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you.
Yesterday a person I thought I knew well proved himself to be someone I didn’t know at all. I believed this friend to be a good, solid, middle class American who served his country in Vietnam, who pays his taxes and attends church on Sunday morning. You don’t expect a lot of surprises from such people, but surprise me he did.
I live squarely in the middle of the deep South, smack dab in the middle of the Volunteer State. I live in a city where courageous black college students successfully staged now legendary lunch counter sit-ins back in 1960s. I live in a city where segregation and racism once seemed as culturally intractable as cornbread and country music, but now a progressive city which has largely overcome bigotry, prejudice and racial hatred. How could it be that I am receiving racist hate mail worthy of Storm Front and the KKK from a friend in California? (Actually, I found a copy of the email quoted on the Storm Front website…. and, no, I won’t provide a link to Storm Front.)
I know there are people who hate Barack Obama, and I know that hatred is in large part fueled by racism. I know that blind hatred of a black president, because he is black, is causing otherwise stable people to become a bit unhinged and to oppose legislative efforts which would benefit them—legislation which, if proposed by a white president, I believe they would support. Health care reform, for example. What I did not know is the scope of the problem.
Yesterday my friend in California forwarded to me a chain email, asking that I forward it on to others. Like a communicable disease the sick thinking expressed in the email is spread throughout the country, and an increasing number of people are being infected. By the end of the day yesterday I received a total of five more copies of the email. Apparently, the email’s message was catching on, and the number of people “passing it across America” (as the email urges) was growing exponentially.
So, what did the email say? Well, let’s take a look.
After a brief introduction, the email contains a copy of an essay purportedly written by the misanthropic crackpot Fred Reed, an ex patriot writer living in Mexico. The introduction hypes Reed as a serious journalist of some sort, identifying him as “a former police reporter for one of the large Washington newspapers.” For what it’s worth, Reed, did at one time write for a D.C. newspaper, but not for the Washington Post or any paper on par with the Washington Post. He wrote for the Washington Times.
The topic of the copied essay was slavery reparations. I know, I know… The essay takes the form of an open letter to Prof. Henry Louis Gates, the noted black Harvard scholar recently in the news for his altercation with Cambidge, MA police. Anyway, I have no idea whether Fred Reed wrote the piece or not. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did, but I am surprised that anyone would want to read it, let alone circulate it.
Try these quotes:
“How about you guys paying whites reparations for current expenses caused by blacks? Not long ago blacks burned down half of Los Angeles, a city in my country. Cities are expensive, Hank. Build one sometime and you’ll see what I mean. Whites had to pay taxes to repair Los Angeles for you. You can send me a check.”…….
“I can’t live in the capital city of my own country because of crime committed by blacks. Toss in the cultural cost of lowering standards in everything for the benefit of blacks. See what I mean?”………
“Hank… I think blacks are too accustomed to getting anything they want by just demanding it. True, it has worked for over half a century. Get a few hundred people in the street, implicitly threaten to loot and burn, holler about slavery, and sadly, the Great White Cash Spigot turns on.”……….
“The thing is, whites don’t much buy it any longer. Most recognize that what once was a civil-rights movement has become a shakedown game. Few people still feel responsible for the failings and inadequacies of blacks. Political correctness keeps the lid on—but everyone knows the score. Which scares me, Hank.”
Okay, you get the idea. It’s the kind of rhetoric you may have heard as a child or encountered in a movie. It lends itself to any number of adjectives like mean, hateful, ignorant, bigoted, dangerous and un-American. Maybe you, like me, thought we’d largely stomped this kind of thing out in America. Like me, you need to think again.
So, why am I calling all of this to your attention? Well, for two reasons. First, because this kind of race hatred needs to be addressed now, not after it grows into full maturity and results in the kind of acts that hatred motivates. Secondly, because we all need to understand what is driving much of the opposition to legislative efforts that we all desperately need.
Much of the opposition isn’t really to health care reform, bankruptcy reform, credit card industry reform, or any of the other legislative efforts of the Obama administration. It’s just opposition to the President’s race.
Yes, I have just played the race card. It was dealt to me in an email I received yesterday.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Sad commentaries on the state of race relations in this nation, the original composition and Prentice’s response to it. I’ve felt for years that in these United States we’re no closer to an America “where a man is judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin” than we were when Dr. King uttered these words (or similar, I may not have the quote verbatim). And I long for it. I long for a time when there’s no overt or covert discrimination against anybody, no more of Sunday morning church hour being the most segregated hour in America, no felt need for Affirmative Action-generated quotas, no reverse discrimination against white males (such as yours truly has once in a great while suffered).
Thanks for the reference to the importance of Nashville in the struggle for equality (i.e., the ’60s lunch-counter sit-ins). I doublt that folks here or elsewhere in the USA take sufficient notice of how Nashville played a role both in the struggle for racial equality and the earlier struggle for enfranchisement for women (because the Tennessee legislature meeting in Nashville made it the State that ratified the Constitutional amendment giving women the vote).
A couple of corrections. Nashville isn’t actually in the “Deep South”. The geographical and historical definition of this is the so-called “Cotton Belt States”, that is, from the Carolinas south and west to Mississippi. Even North Carolina is not included in “Deep South”. The Volunteer State is generally placed among the “Mid-South States”. A helpful way to remember which Southern States are “Deep South” is to consider which had seceded BEFORE the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s resulting declaration of war.
The other correction is more sobering. You may have considered that racist attitudes had been stomped out. But I’ve felt for years and years that the elimination of legal and/or overt forms of racial discrimination — segregated schools, Klansmen burning their blasphemous crosses, public use of the “n” word, etc. — was NOT being matched with a corresponding elimination of racist individual, personal attitudes and individual covert feelings or actions. Some of what I overheard as a substitute teacher (or even before this as a full-time teacher) or as a bus rider or strolling around city streets convinced me of this. (I haven’t even bothered with listening to talking heads in the broadcast media.) Racism may have been banished from public display, but it surely hadn’t been banished from all American hearts. You simply cannot change a person’s attitudes from the outside, any moe than you can force an alcoholic to admit their alcoholism. Change MUST be from the inside out. And alas! inwardly America is no closer to Dr. King’s dream.
I received the same email from one of my friends. I don’t think most people even read the things they forward to others. They just scan over it and get the gist of it. The gist of this email is that some African Americans want reparations for slavery and the author of the email wants to make fun of that. The email is in poor taste and not at all funny, but I am not so sure that the author intended the email to be racist and I am sure that the friend who forwarded the email to me isn’t a racist. A lot of people are just tired of having unjust demands made on them and are wanting to vent their frustrations. Thinking that reparations and slavery in this day and age is a little silly does not mean that you are a racist. It just means that you are fed up with all of the crazy demands that people put upon you for things they don’t deserve.
Most people would not make a racist statement in public. However, I believe that a very high percentage of people do have some racial prejudice that only comes out when they are talking with friends. I hear racial slurs from friends all the time, and they all just assume that everyone who hears them agrees with the way they think. So, yes I think that race still plays a very big role in the opinions people hold and in the way they feel about President Obama.
I think you are kind of missing the point Elizabeth. While I am sure the author of the email intended it to be racist, the person who forwarded it to you is racist, but doesn’t realize it. That is a big part of the problem. Most people don’t think they are racist, but most people are. At least to some extent. We all need to examine our speech and actions. Not intending to be racist does not make you not racist.
Having been raised in the deep south and then marrying and living in the north I have to say that from what I see, racism is stronger in the south than in other parts of the country. My grown children just don’t understand racism at all and are appalled by the very idea of it. They were not raised with any racist ideas coming from their parents and becoming adults and thinking their own thoughts they have not been initiated into the feelings, emotions and ideas of racism. I do think their generation is better equipped to allow others to live and be who they are. They cheer me on when I stand up to family members in the south who still express racist ideas and feelings. Hopefully racism in the south will die out as time goes on.