Bigotry Etc.
Sep 6th, 2005 at 10:55 am by Susie
I had the misfortune to be around some bigots this week-end as I watched the footage from New Orleans. I hadn’t heard some of this stuff so frankly admitted since I was a kid (when I heard it a lot.) The twisted, subterranean, politically incorrect world of racism has reared its ugly head.
This is just the latest chapter in the oldest story in America. We should be aware of it and understand it. And we should also be glad that it isn’t worse because in the past it certainly was.
Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti’s slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt — black revolt — entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60’s the anger became explicit and words like “by any means necessary” reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement — and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.
Race is America’s deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.
Nobody wants to address this issue and digby hits a nerve here.
This is the ugly secret that bedevils liberals and conservatives. They don’t realize that they need to come to grips with their own biases and prejudices.
Civil rights laws are for white people. Black people knew they had rights, knew they were equal, knew they were citizens, but it is white people that needed to be reminded of this fact.
I have a question: why are whites so scared of black people? Guilt?
What is so uncomfortable? Just askin’? No need for rants, just a simple survey. Nobody should jump on anybody’s opinion - no matter how much it angers you.
Here is an opportunity to look into yourself and see what others really think. Do you have the courage to really look.