Today I watched a very profound post by Bob Johnson, removed from the rec list at MyDD. I just read another diary there referring to people who called Mayor Nutter's office in Philadelphia "savages" with a link to a post calling them "thugs". I have read other more inflammatory statements there, which I don't want to repeat.
I want to echo the sentiments of another person who just posted a diary here wondering What the heck is going on in the blogsophere? but from my perspective as a woman of color.
I am shaking with anger right now. I am trying to control my rage and write about this as calmly as I can.
I know I'm a newbie here at DKos, and you all have helped me get over my initial timidity about this site. I now post comments, and have even posted a few diaries.
Rather than reprise a comment I made on MyDD today, I'm going to repost my response to Bob Johnson's post over there, and then I have something to say to the DKos community.
My Response to Bob Johnson's diary on MyDD
I'd like to comment here, and am doing so with trepidation. I recently joined 4 sites that seemed to me to be places where an aging (age 60) Democrat, could get excited and share with other's her perceptions of the amazing opportunity we now have to get the White House and the country back, and hopefully sweep in enough other elected officials to change the suicide course this nation is on currently.
My students, college age, encouraged me to log on, join-up, and to add my perspective to the many younger voices now heard online. They chided me to get involved, particularly because they know my history; as a feminist, activist in the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the Puerto Rican and Native American movements in this country.
As a child of a multi-racial family, I lived in the Deep South. I also lived in the North. I've seen the KKK, and lost dear friends who were murdered simply for registering people to vote.
I grew up with a staunchly Republican granddad - who voted for the "Party of Lincoln". I remember the haters and white supremacists, who posted signs reading "no niggers, no Jews, no papists, no dogs" from personal experience. I also have lived on the often forgotten concentration camps called Indian reservations.
I remember the Democrats who were Dixiecrats. But the Democratic Party changed, and JFK and others swept in a new breed, and the old Dixiecrats fled to the Republican Party, and the Dems were a place where I could safely be. It was a party where I could be safe from the haters, the race baiters, the anti-Semites, the anti-Catholics, the ethno-centrists, the Native killers.
So, a few months ago, I started reading the sites recommended by my students. After figuring out the technology, I joined and logged in. I began to read more and more diaries, and finally decided to make some preliminary comments, and then post diaries of my own.
But somewhere along the way, I started to become fearful. When the Reverend Wright issue hit the fan, I was appalled. Not by Reverend Wright, I'm familiar with African-American churches and preachers; though I'm not a Christian. I sat in plenty pews during the Civil Rights movement. As a scholar, I've studied the role and function of the Black Church, both historically, and in the present day.
I was appalled at the number of Democrats who took the bait, and jumped into the cesspool of hate speech, equating Barack Obama's church membership with him being anti-white. I was confused by those who refused to listen to scholars and others who were small voices crying into a maelstrom of vituperative, un-informed, hateful, and reactionary responses to a manufactured tempest, manipulated by Fox News and worse, to undermine the candidacy of one of the Democratic contestants. More astonishing were those who have openly stated that they would rather vote for John McCain, if their candidate of choice didn't get nominated.
"Are these Democrats?", I wondered. Have the Dixiecrats somehow crept back into the Party while I wasn't looking? I shook my head in disbelief and shuddered. My worst nightmare was coming true...I was being catapulted back into my childhood years of hiding under the bed while my dad and other valiant professors armed themselves against cross-burners in Baton Rouge LA when I was 8 years old.
Surely not. These must be trolls. I'd read about trolls on the net, and this had to be what was happening. Sadly, I was proved wrong. I checked the wayback machine, and found, much to my surprise that some of the diaries I was reading were from folks who had in the past been rational Democrats, somehow now transformed into the feared other.
I said a prayer. But prayer does little good without action. So I began to post. My first post was not here, nor was it on DKos. It was at TPM. As a newbie poster, the reception was warm and friendly, for the first hour. And then I logged back on and found some rude, hateful vicious responses that were I the mother, or grandmother or elder of those persons I would have washed their mouths out with soap and they would have been taken out back to the woodshed for a major old-fashioned whipping. But that can't be done on the internet, and so I responded as civilly as I could and as I was raised to talk to folks by my parents.
The civility was met with blind hatred. I was mocked for my race, and ethnicity, excoriated about my feminism, dismissed as irrelevant, and spoken to like a cur in the streets.
I will admit to you openly, that I did not get the same response at the DKos site. I do not approve of sexist remarks, and though I have strong criticisms of Senator Clinton, who I voted for to be the Senator from my state, I will not click a rec/mojo button for posts which are sexist, in my understanding of the term. Nor will I approve of racist remarks, of which there were some on DKos, more on TPM and there seemed to be even more here at MyDD.
This site is making me afraid. Afraid for the future of our Party. Afraid for my own anger to be unleashed. I've spent years trying as an anthropologist to develop my abilities to look at things through each culture's perspective; to hone my cultural relativism. But the anger that is welling up inside of me has to come out. I am reminded of a dear woman I had the good fortune to meet in my first year of college in 1964. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. On her tombstone are her famous words, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired".
So to quote her, I'd like to say to you all, I am damned sick and tired of this hatefulness. Get a grip, grow up - and remember every word you write here, and on other net pages is there forever; to be dredged up and used against us all in the battle to come. Debate policy, debate tactics, debate positions, debate the merits of the candidates. But leave the hate, and the racism and the sexism behind. Stop before it is too late.
Do you not see what you are doing? Are you so blinded by having to be right, or cute, or witty or sarcastic, that you are unaware of how deeply you wound some of us who read, and rarely have much to say here, if we can get up enough nerve to say anything at all?
Do you not have any empathy for those of us who are not like you? Who may have a different take on our history and herstory? What is Democracy to you? A game? For me it is life and death. For my people, and for me (and I am the fruit of many trees) it is our only hope. When I was 24, I vowed to not become an exile from the soil that nurtured my ancestors. I had the option to leave America and never look back. But I could not. This is my country. With its flaws, and stains, and a checkered past, it's the best option we collectively have.
So I will not stand on the sidelines any longer. I will continue to post here, and read here.
Some of you have posted that Mr. Johnson, who I don't know should leave this site.
I hope that he does not. He, and a few others of you have given me the courage to remain, and resist.
Are we to all sit in little ghettos - only talking to those who agree with us? That path is the road to failure, and will end only in the victory of John McCain, and all that he represents, for not only the future of this country, but for citizens of the world.
Let us remember the KAIANARASERAKOWA (the Great Law of Peace) of the Haudenosaunee; Mohawk-Oneida-Onondaga-Cayuga-Sene ca-Tuscarora
I am beginning to understand those of you who refuse to set foot in that place. I have read enough here to begin to understand that some bloggers took their posts over to MyDD never to return here. I'd like to thank Bob Johnson, and a few other people who I am beginning to recognize over there, some of whom are Kossaks. But more troops are needed to defend the fort.
I am clear that the loss of rational responses to the vitriolic filth - yes racist filth being spewed there cannot be allowed to go unanswered, simply because it is now permanently a part of the "Democratic" online record - to be accessed by people who may not even have a clue about what is really going on. These smears will also be cited by Republicans in the days ahead.
Many of you do not remember Dixiecrats like George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Russell B. Long. I do. Thankfully, many Dixiecrats ended up in the Republican party - good riddance to bad rubbish. But unfortunately that is the party that has been controlling us for the last 8 years, and we are on the verge of ousting them - or so I thought. Until I began to read blogs by Democrats,not just on MyDD but on other sites, where the familiar sound of hate speech was slowly creeping back into this Party and being accepted.
The moment anyone tries to counter it, the irony is they are branded racists themselves, or taunted for playing a "race card".
I do not like the sexism either. I am a feminist. But when I have tried to discuss my support of Barack Obama online, some long time feminists have attempted to silence me by branding me a racist. I understand Alice Walker's frustration. I am angry each time I see "statistics" from polls which state that women over 50 are solid HRC supporters. Well I'm 60. But the fact that my skin is beige and not pink has somehow negated my gender.
Somehow, my blackness invalidates my choice of Obama as the best candidate for our Party. Just as the votes of blacks in Mississippi are no longer valid Democratic votes. They are simply "black votes". We don't count. We, "the savages", are incapable of making reasoned decisions. Which was how we were Klu Kluxed and poll-taxed out of our franchise. And it is happening again. Right here in Democratic Party land.
I would like to ask every honorable white person in the Democratic Party to spend at least one hour a day, answering and countering this filth, with sound reason, and honest truths. To refrain, no matter how tempting from "dissing" Hillary, and posting to all those silent lurkers, who have still not made up their minds. I'm having a hard enough time answering the crap I read about both African-Americans and Latinos with dignity and civility. And yes, Asians, and Native Americans and Latinos have to speak up too, but sadly it is now the "white people" who count, and just as we marched together, registered folks to vote together, and some died together to change this country, we have to do it again - you have to stand up and fight this tooth and nail. I am happy to feel comfortable here at DKos, but comfort can lull us all into complacency.
Barack Obama initiated a brilliant conversation about race, when backed against a wall over Rev. Wright. But the conversation in some quarters is turning into the ugly sounds of a lynch mob.
I am reminded of the words written by the Jamaican-born poet and writer from the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McCay, in response to race riots in 1919:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
I am asking you all to fight back. But this time with words.