Jesus Christ. I graduated from high school in 1996. I frequently heard the "joke" that NAACP stands for "niggers are all cotton pickers." I like to think it's a little better in the bigger city where I live, but it's not. At all. Reading the news of my hometown this a.m., I am afraid there's going to be a Jena vol. 2 there over some things going down at one of the high schools. Makes my blood boil when I hear asshats talk about "special interest groups" and how the NAACP and SPLC are racist organizations.

I grew up in south eastern Missouri and we had towns like Jena all over. Where I was was pretty integrated, there were still problems, mostly in the 80s, but we did have a town north of us that was understood to not be tolerant of black people and black people were not to go into the TOWN, PERIOD. If you needed gas then god help you get to the next truck stop.

There was also one year I was in junior high where the KKK was going to hold a rally in the next town over, and the town's city council almost had a fit, trying to get them to not have it there because it would look bad for the town, which was also well integrated. It was the talk of my school for the longest time, (until the KKK decided not to have the rally) and I distinctly remember two of my white male classmates telling me they were going to go just so they could join the KKK. To this day I never understood why they bothered to make a point of telling me (then again, we were in a group and I was the only black one there) and when I told my mom she replied, "At least you'll know who's under the sheets."

It is sad, but what's sadder is how a lot of white America, liberals included, don't want to acknowledge that we're still living with this kind of racism and then will brush it off as the South and southern regions being "backwards" when racism is all over this country.

t is sad, but what's sadder is how a lot of white America, liberals included, don't want to acknowledge that we're still living with this kind of racism and then will brush it off as the South and southern regions being "backwards" when racism is all over this country.

Yeah, that was pretty much my take on it when I wrote about it this morning. I know that I have undue privilege because I was born white and male, and I try to make sure it informs my daily life, but even so, I can't truly begin to understand what it feels like to live under that sort of oppression daily.

And the metaphor of the parasite was the most apt I've ever read.

BabyPop, I graduated in '95 from a high school in a Memphis suburb. My class was not allowed to perform a senior skit at the homecoming pep rally. Why, you ask? Because our junior skit the year before had consisted of 3 or 4 white football players putting on blackface and lip-syncing to Onyx's "Slam." I remember hearing about this from a white cheerleader (I didn't attend pep rallies, fancying myself a Goth at the time), who was complaining about the punishment. When I pointed out that the junior skit was RACISTFERCHRISSAKES, she looked blank for a moment, and then said, "Why? All those boys were doing was showing how much they admired those rappers and wanted to be like them!"

My husband's and my families are still in Memphis or further south, and some of his relatives in particular are openly, proudly racist. One of the last times we visited, his father complained about how all the "damn blacks" were kicking up a fuss again. Turns out they were protesting a statue in a public park of Nathaniel Bedford Forrest... who was a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. The African-Americans wanted the statue taken down, and the whites just "couldn't understand why."

God, there's more, like the 3 ginormous *white crosses* that were erected next to the highway to mark the entrance to Bellevue Baptist Church, the premier Southern Baptist congregation. My mother casually mentioned that the church had had a "cross-lighting ceremony" to inaugurate them -- turns out the crosses were lit with floodlights, not set on fire, but to choose that symbol and that language was clearly hostile.

Examples like these are egregious, and make me shake my head every time I'm down there, but it took me years to recognize that Chicago, where I've been since I left home, isn't some utopia of equality either. It's notoriously segregated geographically, just as much as Memphis is, with the same police brutality towards African-Americans and Latinos. Just because people aren't burning crosses on lawns here or walking around in blackface doesn't mean minorities aren't oppressed. I think the racism here is actually more insidious because it's subtler and more deniable. And I really hope that the mainstream reaction to the Jena troubles isn't "oh, look at those yokels, those backwater crackers. Isn't it a shame that there are places like that where racism is alive and well? Thank God we live [insert region other than the South] where we don't have those problems anymore."

Wow, ankathry. Amazing. Our senior song was "A Country Boy Can Survive." Seriously. Fortunately, the teachers overruled it (even though I have grown to sorta like Hank Jr. since then, I still resent the majority of my graduating class voting on it.) It's hard to try to talk to friends of a different mindset about such things without them getting all up in arms about how they don't have "white guilt" and such-and-such group should just "get over it."

Ugh. It's like getting sucker punched. It's nothing new but something I tend to forget, living in the area I do with the friends that I am very fortunate to have...

But this is good, I need to be reminded that yes this is still an issue, and yes people need to realize it. Racism is so deeply rooted in this country, I remember once hearing a bit of news from Fox (god forbid) about how this white woman was afraid that should be come a minority in her own country with the increasing amount of Mexican immigrants. I couldn't believe what I had heard! But she only stated what so many white people believe, if you are any kind of brown that doesn't come from a huge dose of tanning spray you're not part of this country, regardless of whether or not your family has been here for generations, regardless if you were born here, you don't belong here.

It's something that always comes into my head when I'm out somewhere with my white boyfriend, that I somehow invaded enemy territory and it's not right. Or how there are some states I will never willingly go to because of fear. How sad is that?

Right, BabyPop! The whole "get-over-it-you-have-affirmative-action-now-what-the-hell-else-do-you-want" argument. I can't talk to my parents or in-laws about racism or Eurocentrism (and they, thank jeebus, self-censor too now when I'm around) because their assumptions are just so uninformed and self-serving. You generally can't argue someone into being empathic, or at least have to do so over a longer period of time than I have the stamina for. It's really difficult, too, coming to grips with the fact that you have to (and do) love someone, because s/he's family/a friend and/or very sweet in other ways, whose ideology you simply can't respect.

I am tired of not being surprised.

I am tired of my lowest expectations being met with force.

I will always remember when going to the see the exhibit of lynchings in America Without Sanctuary http://withoutsanctuary.org/

How very SURPRISED all the white students where! All of us college students and they were just so surprised and shocked!

Their astonishment and ignorance about this was the real exhibit for me. I knew about lynchings like I know about the presidents.

don't mean for that to sound so contemptuous...I was shocked at their shockedness...I found it curious they were soooo suprised.

There is shit like this everywhere. I personally think its worse in the south but at least the acknowledge they dont get along. its more hidden in the north. its not going to stop either, and its NOT ONLY the white majorities fault, esp when you have something like the michael vick thing going on and the NAACP bringing race into it and defending him for horrible actions. Bill Cosby has it right. There is not going to be any progress made until BOTH sides try. I assure you i dont see it happening any time soon.

I am so tired of that phrase!! "bringing race into it"

THERE'S NO SUCH THING! If you are of a racial make up in America, then race is already in it!

As if you could just subtract it from a situation anymore than you could subtract your sex.

And alas, those who have privlege are blind to the way others suffer...they say racism doesn't exist anymore...fuck.

I live in the North and we just had a huge KKK rally a few weeks ago. When I first moved to the town I live in, I had people at my work casually say, "Oh, that's a black town." A girl I work w/ expressed surprise that she'd actually gotten to know the black people in this town and that they're just like everyone else (I'm not sure what she was expecting). Another woman I work w/ was upset over the possibility of a hate crimes bill being passed b/c "they" could arrest a person for saying, "Black people are stupid."

Yeah, we've come so far.

Thank you for posting this!! It makes me realize quiet disapproval is not enough. If enough people stand by and "mind their own business" nothing will change.