This is very difficult for me to write. If I say anything that anyone finds offensive, please forgive me. It is entirely from ignorance and my own personal clumsiness. I write from a position of my own type of privilege and perspective, which I know is not that of American Blacks or others who have been the subjects of tremendous historical abuse in this country.
I don’t want to go through my entire personal history, though perhaps I should. I was raised on a small farm in rural Michigan. There were no Blacks there. There were no Asians or even any Indigenous people. Heck, there were darned few white people.
The local farms were in the hands of older people who had raised their families and in many cases were retired but simply remained living on the farmsteads they no longer farmed, so there were no kids my own age to play with. Civil rights, minority people, Black kids…? I guess I was vaguely aware of them.
I left that place when I was in my early teens and went to several high schools (my parents moved a lot during that period.) There was not one Black kid in the first high school I went to. In the last high school I attended there was exactly one but he wasn’t in my grade. I saw him in the aisles between classes sometimes.
I guess what I am trying to say is, if there was anyone who might feel uncomfortable or awkward (dare we say scared?) around black people I suppose it could have been me. They were just not part of my thinking when I was young.
Okay, this is all buildup just to say, I have no words to say how I feel about what is happening in Florida. Perhaps it is precisely because of my sheltered upbringing, but I cannot understand it. To say appalled, disgusted, horrified- yes, all of these and more. But beyond that…
Why does this matter so much to these people? Why try to put a good face on slavery 160 years after it was abolished? What would these people gain even if this did work? And it won’t. From what I can see it is making the people who are pushing this ‘slavery was good’ argument into total laughingstocks.
I know my ancestors were not involved and perhaps if I knew that my ancestors owned slaves I might think differently. But I am in my seventies and my great-grandfather was born in 1856. You would have to go back yet another generation to find anyone in my family who was even alive when slavery was legal, let alone being a slave owner. That is reaching the point of arguing over events during the Hundred Years War in Europe just because one of your ancestors was a Walloon.
I know the reason they are doing it, we all know the reason they are doing it. It is an attempt to justify an ongoing culture of hatred, oppression and marginalization of Black people. It is using a historical event that ended when our grandparents’ grandparents were alive to serve a modern agenda.
These people shame themselves.
I am trying to keep this short and simple. Even I seldom read long diaries here and I don’t have too much to say anyway but I am just reeling by what is happening in Florida and so many other places in this country. It has me sick to my stomach with disgust.
I know this is not a site where many of the people who are pounding us with racist and oppressive laws will hear what we say but this is my forum and I have to say it.
Silence is not always complicity but sometimes it is. I want to say that I am fighting against them. One small voice but it is the only voice I have.
I will not sit meekly back and let them defile the world again.
We have to stop this. It is not enough to roll our eyes and be outraged. They are shaming themselves and trying to drag us all down with them and we cannot let them do it.
If anyone knows any way a very poor, old man in rural Michigan can help the Democratic Party in Florida to fight back, please do let me know. I cannot man the protest lines like I did when I was young, but I will do what I can.
This cannot stand.