I just saw a stunningly racist FB post from a neighbor whom I used to look up to as a young child. I’m so sad that her choice has been to be suffused with hate rather than compassion.
But her post, putatively (but falsely) claiming to share an editorial from a Baltimore newspaper, gives me an opportunity to point out a terrible misconception that I find to be common on the “right.” I will quote part of it here:
“When half of the people get the idea that they don't have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.”
This may be quite true. But it is sadly misapplied.
Here is the truth:
When the slave-owning tenth (for convenience) got the idea that they didn’t have to work because their Black slaves were destined - and purchased - to do their work for them ... and when the subjects of slavery knew very well that the white masters would get all the benefit of their labor ... something had to end.
THIS is the major story of inequity's deep roots in this country. To suggest, as the material quoted above does, that there is now a beleaguered class of hard-working, productive noble (of course, mostly white) people whose entire labor is being bled to support lazy, indolent “somebody else”, is a despicable lie, an inversion of history.
Here's more of the truth:
In the twentieth century, under restrictive covenants, when white city planners realized that Black neighborhoods had no options to resist being destroyed for the paths of highways and interchanges, and when white zoning boards summarily zoned Black neighborhoods out of existence in order to situate industrial parks there - rife with pollution and kickbacks - and Black homeowners were powerless to do anything but leave their beloved homes for a pitiful penny on the dollar, something had to end.
When the school districts near Ferguson, MO, were realigned such that the taxes paid by white and Black families alike built new and sumptuous classrooms where white kids could learn, but the school where a young man named Michael Brown attended had less than half-a-dozen graduation gowns to lend seniors so that their graduation photos were spread through the school year in order to pass along the gowns from one senior to another, something has to end.
When men, women and children of color are summarily executed far out of proportion to the experience of white criminals, when a cadre of militarized and aggressive (mostly male) agents of the state know that the magic words "I was in fear for my life", no matter how ridiculous that claim, renders them unaccountable for almost any poor person's death at their hands - then, too, something has to change.
I grew up very near to my Facebook friend, and remember the loud, vile racism of one other particular neighbor whose property adjoined a corner of ours through the woods. I remember the deep prejudice against Catholics in the little town where we went to school: the tannery had brought in a new manager - an outsider - and it wasn’t safe for that family's children to attend our tiny four-room school, because they might be harmed due to their family’s Catholicism. I’m very glad to have grown out of that morass of hatred - at least to a degree: I probably have further to go than I realize.
But I can at least wish and hope for an opening of minds and hearts among those of my neighbors old and current.