I wasn't going to say anything about this, because my overall impression is that these days if you use the word "racist" people stop listening to you. Sometimes I see things adding up to a picture that, from what I can tell, most of the rest of the world doesn't seem to see. When tht happens, I tend to keep quiet about it, for fear that I might be seen as crazy, or because maybe I really
am crazy. But lately I've been seeing too many things that add up to picture that makes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up a bit.
First, it was the cross burnings in Durham, NC.
Police in Durham, North Carolina, have launched an investigation after three crosses were set alight in one night - triggering fears that the Ku Klux Klan may have targeted the city. Yellow leaflets, purportedly produced by the KKK, were found at the site of one of the burning crosses.
While burning crosses have long been associated with the Klan, people in Durham said this was the first time for a generation that such an incident had been reported in the city. Students of the Klan also say that it is vastly reduced in its membership and influence from 40 years ago. It may be that the crosses were simply set ablaze by pranksters.
Pranksters or no, it invoked something for me, but I didn't know what I wanted to say about it, so I filed it away. Then, via AmericaBlog comes the news that the Family Research Council—the group holding the other end of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's leash— just under ten years ago gave white supremacist David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list, and just a few years ago its president addressed country's premier white supremacist group the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And then, from several blogs in the last day or so, comes the story of an incident in Texas that sounds like something out of the pre-civil rights era. (You know, the one to which so many conservatives seem to long to return.)
They picked up Billy Ray Johnson outside a convenience store in this East Texas bayou town, a place where Confederate flags fly in some front yards and a mural of barefoot slaves picking cotton greets patrons inside the local post office.
On a cool September night in 2003, they drove the 42-year-old mentally retarded black man to a cow pasture where a crowd of white youths was having a party. They got Johnson drunk, they made him dance, they jeered at him with racial epithets.
Then, according to court testimony, one of Johnson's assailants punched him in the face, knocking him out cold. They tossed his unconscious body into the back of a pickup and dumped him by the side of a dirt road, on top of a mound of stinging fire ants.
…Today he lives on public assistance, confined to a nursing home in nearby Texarkana, where his family fears he will have to remain for the rest of his life.
The four young white men convicted of various charges in the incident are confined in the county jail, but not for long. A judge last month sentenced three of the four to terms of 30 days in jail, and the fourth to 60 days.
Even that, however, was more than the jurors who heard two of the cases thought appropriate: They acquitted the defendants of the most serious charges and recommended no jail time at all.
To many African-Americans in Linden, the impoverished county seat of Cass County hard by the Arkansas and Louisiana borders, what happened to Johnson was nothing less than a hate crime, frighteningly reminiscent of the worst racial attacks in the Old South.
"There's people down here doing things to dogs, and they get more than a year in prison," said Lue Wilson, 58, Johnson's cousin and legal guardian. "You'll never get a jury in Cass County to convict a white man for doing something to a black man."
But to many whites here, the incident was simply a story of some "good ole boys" drinking too much and getting out of hand.
"It was a very unfortunate and senseless thing," said Wilford Penny, 73, who last month completed a 6-year term as Linden's mayor. "But I don't think there was anything racial about it. These guys were drinking, and this guy [Johnson] liked to dance. I'm not surprised when they get to drinking and use the n-word. The black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out there."
I'm dazed for a minute, then I have to shake my head and remember where I am and what decade I'm in. But before I can gather my thoughts, I remember that we're also a nation in a war stance, bringing the considerable weight of our military stance to bear no countries predominantly populated by non-christian, brown-skinned people, and that in the minds of a lot of people—including our president, whether he knows it or not—that "American" means white. Maybe "human" does too. It certainly does when we, and I use the term "we" loosely here, area a nation at war with a foreign enemy; with an "other" who must be dehumanized in order to be fought.
Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.
"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."
The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."
He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "
"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.
I'm almost surprised, until Kevin of Lean Left pulls it all together and reminds me:
…that Trent Lott is still in a leadership position in the GOP Senate caucus. And I would remind you that every single GOP candidate made a trek to Bob Jones University, where inter-racial dating was not allowed well into the 90s…
…they play footsie with racists when convenient, and in doing so, send the unmistakable message to racists that the at least some of the GOP is on their side.
So, I'm not crazy. Bubbling just barely below the surface of our times, and threatening to break the surface at any moment, are the issues of race and racism. They are part of the tenor of our times, and perhaps there's never been a time when they weren't. It could be that I'm being influenced some what by recent reading related to the history of the Civil Rights movement, and a book I'm currently reading that details the history of the African slave trade and slavery in the U.S. At the same time, Jesse Helms is back in the news with a new memoir that is unrepentant concerning his opposition to integration.
I don't want to paint all conservatives with the same brush, and I'm not saying that if you scratch a conservative you'll find a racist. But where I come from, it's no big secret that when Johnson put pen to paper on the Civil Rights Act, it was the last straw for hordes of southern Democrats who were dedicated to defending and upholding segregation and the "southern way of life." A good many o them, Strom Thurmond perhaps the most prominent among them, left the Democratic party, went straight to the Republican fold, and there they stayed. There they are still, apparently.
So, at a time when a conservative Republican majority holds the White House, and a majority in both Houses of Congress; when the country is at war, dissent is discouraged with various disincentives, and "the American way of life" is sacrosanct…it's hardly a coincidence that Americans are burning crosses in North Carolina, making "niggers" dance in Texas, and hurling bottles and insults at "hajis" and "ragheads" (and probably "sand niggers") in Iraq.
It worries me, because this is the America I walk around in every day, but moreso because this is the America my son will have to grow up with, and it seems to have changed so little at its core.