America Broke My Spirit

I spend anxious days and view many people with suspicion. I cry. I can’t quiet my mind at night. I keep the news on almost 24/7.  I talk about these days on FaceBook to the discomfort of my FB friends. Both my daughters report crying and anxiety, too. My husband is agitated.

The two days I decided to shut the news off, bombs went off in NY/NJ and a black man was shot and killed in a police stop after his car broke down in Tulsa, OK.

One of the pilots in the helicopter circling over the scene said, “… looks like a bad dude. Might be on something.” But I didn’t see that. In the video taken from the helicopter, Terence Crutcher was walking slowly with his hands in the air. He did not appear dangerous. Nor did he have anything in his hands. Later police claimed he might have had PCP in his car, the usual criminalization and thugification of the victim. His twin sister Dr. Tiffany Crutcher said, “He didn’t have a chance to live.”

Crutcher, 40, did not deserve to die that day.

Then one day later in Charlotte, NC, police shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, allegedly for carrying a gun. His family disputes this fact, and many witnesses came forward to say he spent each day reading in his car.  The police videos have not been released to the public as I write this. The family got to review them, and the attorneys representing them said the review just raised more questions.  Protests broke out, and when police arrived in riot gear, violence broke out. One person was shot and killed, not by a police officer, and neither his name nor the circumstances of the shooting were released.

North Carolina passed a law that will go into effect on October 1^st. It will make it nearly impossible for the public to obtain access to police video. I believe the authorities are dragging their feet until the law goes into effect.

North Carolina, the state I live in, is an open carry state. People can wear a weapon to the grocery store, to restaurants, walking down the street, and sitting in their cars. How can anyone be shot for carrying a gun when it is perfectly legal? Easily. Just like the stand your ground law in Florida is for white people like George Zimmerman, open carry is for white people in NC and in other open carry states. America is for white people.

Two bits of positive news filtered through my veil of tears and anxiety: Officer Betty Shelby, the officer who shot and killed Terence Crutcher, was charged with first degree manslaughter and protests in Charlotte, despite a call for a state of emergency and a midnight curfew, remained absolutely peaceful on the third evening, even after protesters kept on marching well past midnight.

North Carolina Congressman Robert Pittenger said of the protesters, “"The grievance in their mind is the animus, the anger. They hate white people because white people are successful and they're not."

I am so tired of people like Trump and others who call black Americans poor, uneducated, resentful, angry, lazy, needy, and criminal, any negative adjective will do in their minds. My family, my interracial family, is full of educated professionals. They own homes and cars and buy their own food and go on vacations. My black friends (and I don’t just have one for kicks) are educated professionals, too, though I have certainly known poor people in my life. I was one of them, growing up in a white suburb outside Albany, NY.

White people don’t know how offensive it is when someone assumes you are poor, uneducated, and criminal just because your skin is brown.  And it doesn’t matter where you live, what car you drive, what your profession is. If you have brown skin, America views you differently. This goes for white liberals, too, who believe all the magnanimous equality stuff in theory but quickly revert to stereotypes in practice.

Racial bias is rampant in America. It is hard to deny. My own neighbors chose a white supremacist over Ronald and me, and we have lived here for nine years. I was president of the HOA. I did good things for the neighborhood and Ronald keeps our yard and garden in tiptop shape. Yet, when forced to choose, because I asked them to, they chose the white supremacist, someone who represented the HOA in legal matters, not a neighbor. Most people did not even know his name. But the HOA officer, who refused to replace him, in spite of my protests and resignation, said the attorney was more than just a person who was paid to perform legal services, he was part of HOA, one of them, and not a single neighbor disputed that statement. Not us, though. We aren’t part of the neighborhood. We are interlopers. We are liberals who don’t understand Southern culture, white Southern culture, where white men are superior and everyone else is submissive. We are, as we have been told since moving down here, an abomination because we are guilty of race mixing. We live someplace they don’t think we belong. The sad thing is, black families don’t belong anywhere in America, because white people don’t want them.

Another neighbor who lives behind us, angry that my husband said they had directed their drainpipe on to our property, causing flooding, said, “You think everything bad happens to you because you are black. You are a dumbass.”

Ronald said, “Interesting that you are the one who brought that up and not me.”

Secretary Clinton was lambasted for calling half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables. She was not far off, as she has a brilliant mind for numbers and statistics.

From an NPR story:

…  a PRRI/Atlantic poll this spring found that Trump supporters are more likely than others to say that:

▪       The U.S. is becoming too soft and feminine (68 percent),

▪       It bothers them when they encounter immigrants who do not speak English (64 percent),

▪       The government has paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities (55 percent)

▪       Men and women should stick to more traditional gender roles and tasks (50 percent),

▪       Discrimination against women is no longer a problem (46 percent)

If anything Clinton may have been purposely underestimating the number.

The worst thing, the thing I keep replaying over and over in my head, is when a few HOA members told me I was wrong in saying the attorney was racist. They deemed he was not racist. My thoughts on the topic were not credible.

But here is a portion of a blog post from the national founder and president of the organization the attorney chairs in NC:

But [multiculturalism] is really not about ushering in equality among all races, religions, and cultures; rather, it is about destroying Western Christian civilization, the world's premier unmitigated evil. And because the South is the strongest enclave of this civilization, it finds itself square in the crosshairs of the MC crowd. Why do you think the Feds are not willing to lift a hand to stop our dispossession by a floodtide of illegal immigrants? It is the continuation of Reconstruction to the ultimate degree. We are being replaced as a people. 

Any attempt by Western man to defend himself and his civilization is called "racism," and is designed to paralyze him completely (even when no malice is shown toward any other group). This agenda points up the fact that the proponents of MC seek not fairness, justice, or equality but demonization and destruction of the white, Christian West. Only whites, and white Southerners in particular, are not allowed to have a country all their own. Asia for Asians, Africa for Africans, but no South for white Southerners! 

All indications point to the success of the MC agenda of paralyzing the West through guilt manipulation. Though we never had any sort of debate about whether we wanted to be a MC polity, it has been forced upon us anyway. Anyone who protests is silenced by the usual epithets. Even opposition to illegal immigration is enough to get you called a "racist" or a "xenophobe." If you don't believe me, check out the Southern Poverty Law Center's rants on the subject.

The xenophobic, racist right wants to get rid of political correctness, but they can’t stand to be called what they are, and that is white supremacists. My neighbors were quick to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about. They were quick to blame my ignorance on “that liberal organization,” the Southern Poverty Law Center.  But, oh, don’t go calling them a basket of deplorables.

White supremacists are flocking to support Trump. They haven’t felt so emboldened since David Duke, once the grand wizard of the KKK, ran as a presidential candidate in 1988 – does anyone else even remember this? Today David Duke is running for a Senate seat.

Here is a snippet of an interview with Steve Innskeep of NPR:

[David Duke] was confident that Trump backers in Louisiana would support his Senate run.

"We've already polled inside the Trump voters, and we know that we're going to carry 75 to 80 percent of those who are going to vote for Trump," he said.

Steve asked, "You think Trump voters are your voters?"

"Well, of course they are!" Duke said. "Because I represent the ideas of preserving this country and the heritage of this country, and I think Trump represents that as well."

Black men get shot and killed if they are found in white neighborhoods, even when they live there, and they get shot and killed in predominately black neighborhoods. No place is home if you are black in America. No place is safe.

White people can’t imagine it. They get angry. Why do you keep talking about race? They blame president Obama for being the divisive one.  

Trump campaign chair Kathy Miller said, “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” and she also called Black Lives Matter “a stupid waste of time.”

Then she blamed it all on Obama, saying, “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this ... Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”

She has since resigned her position, playing the scapegoat in a campaign rife with hatred and ignorance.

You can tell me she is just one person. But she is one of the deplorables and there are many more where she came from.

You know what hurts and outrages me the most? When family and friends choose white over acknowledging that what we experience is different than what they experience, and that it is dangerous and scary at times. I don’t need anyone to weigh in on how they perceive the situation. If you haven’t lived it, you have no idea.

I am sure some of my FaceBook friends wonder why I still talk about the HOA incident. Why am I still emotional and why haven’t I put to rest the whole issue because the attorney resigned and the other officers resigned? Why is it a fresh wound that won’t heal?

Because now I know how our neighbors feel about us.

As soon as the police pull over a black man in a traffic stop, he is already considered not one of them, “looking like a bad dude” just for having brown skin. That’s what racial bias does to one’s perception of an individual. Even when the police officer is black, as in the Charlotte shooting, racial bias plays a part. How can having a broken down car, a broken taillight, or maybe “fitting the description” which is oftentimes simply “black male,” turn so deadly, so quickly, and in so many stops?

Don’t tell me not to mourn. Don’t tell me my tears and anxiety are only hurting me. Don’t tell me things aren’t dire. Don’t tell me it only looks bad because the media is drawing attention to it.

Maybe my anger scares you. Your unwillingness to be outraged scares me.

I am not asking you to give away your sense of status and privilege as an American. I am only suggesting it should be available to every American.

You know what would be nice, though? Maybe saying what my friend on FB said to me last night when I was feeling pretty low. She said, “You're not alone. I can't fight your fight, but I can struggle along in my own way.” Thank you.

Footage just released by Scott family. His wife recorded it. She told the police he had traumatic brain injury. There is nothing on the ground by him, but then there is after an officer leans over. Release the police video.
9/24/2016 I had to wait a day to be able to say this because my anger and sorrow reached a terrible place while I watched the video Mrs. Scott took (over and over, I watched): how strong must a person be to record, hold herself still, put aside the terror raging inside her, engage calmly with the police, and watch the them murder her husband in cold blood? Why must she be that strong? Because in America, it is a must. The whole legacy of black American history is to not let them, the white man, break you.  I don't know if I could be that strong. But I know I have to think about it because I may have to one day unless we can stop the senseless murder of black men and women.