Reconstructing the South

I don’t know what to think anymore. When racism, homophobia, and misogyny are openly expressed, I feel like the world tipped, and I can’t gain my footing or think straight. When it visits my life so closely I can touch it, I become unhinged.

A few weeks ago I discovered the attorney who represents my Homeowners Association (HOA) is a prominent member of a noted neo- Confederate hate group, League of the South (LOS).  Their logo is a black cross on a white field. The white field represents white purity and the black cross represents never surrendering to the government. They are against integration, interracial marriage, and equality. They promote secession from the United States.

In their write-up of the LOS, the Southern Poverty Law Center described the hate group, formed in 1994, this way: “The League of the South is a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “European Americans.” The “godly” nation envisioned by the League should be run by an “Anglo-Celtic” (read: white) elite that would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate blacks and other minorities. “

They also believe, as the lawyer representing my HOA said in a video blog,

It simply cannot be honestly disputed that we are under threat from all sides today. Whether it is the media; the Federal government; the state governments, which falsely claim to represent us; or organized agitators – all are arrayed against us and are intent on our destruction as a distinct people. There are influential individuals in the media and in government calling for expressions of our heritage to be a crime. There are some who even call for ethnic cleansing of the South through numerically overwhelming our people at the ballot box by hostile immigrants from other parts of the United States or from the third world. This is nothing other than colonization and ultimately genocide. It may be a soft genocide but it is genocide nonetheless. Our people will be erased through deliberate government policy.

Apparently, even though North Carolina is in the top ten ranked states experiencing population growth, there are certain Southerners who do not want transplants, Northerners like us, or especially interracially married people like us (for first time readers, I am white and my husband is black), to relocate to their state.

The president and founder of the LOS, Michael Hill, recently gave a keynote address at a conference in August 2015 and spoke about letting the liberals assist him in radicalizing Southerners. He said they made his job easier.

I find his words incredibly unsettling.

As the president of the HOA, I don’t care to have the chair of the NC chapter of the LOS conduct legal business on our behalf. I don’t see that he can objectively serve all the neighbors in our development since quite a few of us are people of color and Northern transplants. I also don’t want my dues supporting his hateful rhetoric, which motivates, radicalizes, and incites people to violence.

My fellow board members disagree. They feel he simply has strong opinions. They like him.

We have exactly the same information and yet we disagree. The other officers offered that they share a Southern heritage of which they are proud. I told them my in-laws have a Southern heritage, too.  They were silent, because surely they recognized that the Southern heritage my in-laws experienced included exclusion, violence, socio-economic oppression, and Jim Crow. Or maybe they feel like many outspoken Neo-Confederates who think Southern heritage is only white Southern heritage. Maybe they feel that the experience of black Southerners doesn’t count.

I offered to resign. They asked me if they could do more research first. I felt they were dragging out the inevitable.

Sometimes I just can’t understand how anyone can uphold segregation and exclusion and feel perfectly fine about it.  Or how anyone can scream about radicalized Muslims and be silent about radicalized racists.

In fact, during our discussion one of the officers brought up gay marriage and Kim Davis. He said that even though he agreed with Kim Davis on the definition of marriage, he felt she had a civic duty to perform the work. He felt our attorney, even with his beliefs, was still fulfilling his duty to us.  The other officer chimed in that she didn’t agree with gay marriage either and told a story about how the department she managed during her career had many gay employees and there was nothing she could do about it because she would have lost her job.

If there had been no threat of termination, what would she have felt right doing to the gay employees under her management?

It is not just a strong opinion when you have power over another group’s ability to live, work, learn, worship, and play. It is blatant discrimination. And in the case of the LOS, it is racism at its most virulent.

I interact with people everyday who have “strong opinions” about my marriage and about my moving from the Northeast to the South. I have never been disrespectful. I have never once tried to be punitive.  Yet many felt perfectly fine telling us we are an abomination, staring at us in places we have every right to be in, and, in one frightening encounter, veering their car at us.

That is hatred. That is exclusion. That is the demand that we don’t come into their space, even though it is our space, too.  That is the belief that we are less American than they are, even when they talk of secession. That is dangerous and, in growing situations, deadly.

Our history remains unchanged.

I feel disappointment in my fellow HOA officers, in friends and family, and in Americans overall who don’t share my outrage. In my eyes they are people who aren’t concerned with the rising number of fatalities perpetrated by haters, racists, homophobes, or misogynists. They are blind to systemic racism and either deny its existence or blame the victims of it instead of seeking out the truth.

I find myself staying away from friends, family, and all people. It is not due to my prejudice, because I am a true liberal: tolerant, accepting, and open, and I follow the first documented socialist, Jesus Christ. I exclude myself because I see that even people who are close to us choose not to acknowledge the racism that rages in our country. I am not sure why they choose to pretend it doesn’t happen except maybe they can’t handle it.

When people around me ask why I view everything through the perspective of race, I feel disappointment and anger because they refuse to acknowledge the difference between race and racism. They refuse to acknowledge my truth and the truth of America.

So I choose to go it alone with the few people who share my experience or who are willing to, if not completely understand it, because one can’t unless one experiences it directly, at least agree that it sucks to be a person of color in this country. Not only is it terrible, it is often fatal.

The original sin of our country, slavery, continues to impact the structure of our society and every social interaction transacted in our lives. Everything from our jobs, to housing, education, health care, and class, is impacted by race and privilege in America.

In his commencement speech in 1965 at Howard University, Lyndon B. Johnson said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates."

Organizations like the LOS want to perpetuate the uneven playing field for minorities, women, and LGBT individuals. I have lost hope that we can change the pervasive evil embodied by organizations like the LOS and others like it because our country can’t handle the truth.

This evening I found out the HOA officers can’t handle the truth either. We met again to discuss the attorney. I said, “I’m ready to hear you out.”

Then I got to hear about the different flags that represent Southern heritage, that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy (they were slaves. Did they have a choice?), and just because someone has an opinion doesn’t mean he can’t perform his job. I was told that down here there are probably a lot of people who are members of groups like that.

I responded that was probably true, and I have a right to not do business with people and businesses if I am aware of their associations.

One wanted to know if I’d experienced racism in our neighborhood, and I mentioned our shooter neighbor. “But she’s mental,” was the response.

I asked if they would agree to having a member of the Black Panther Party represent us legally. They vehemently said no. I asked if they would let a radical Muslim represent the HOA. One said she would never have a Muslim attorney, period.

I’d had enough. I stood. I shouted. I told them I was offended that they could sit there and say who they wouldn’t work with but expect me to work with a group trying to radicalize white Southerners against people of color and the government.

Isn’t that the very definition of privilege?

I said, “At the end of the day, all I have is my dignity and my personal ethics.”

I resigned.

As I opened the front door to leave, they asked me not to let the neighbors know my reason for resigning. I told them I had to give the reason, because I made a commitment, and I wanted them to know why I broke it.

My breath heaving, my body electrified, I drove all the way home with the emergency brake on. I told Ronald all I could remember as soon as I let myself into the house. He said he already knew how it was going to turn out. I said, “You are never wrong.”

Then, before I could be blocked from the email group, I wrote:

I am sorry to report that I resigned from the position of president due to deep differences of opinion amongst the board on continuing to do business with an individual who is a member of a known hate group. I would hope that as a neighborhood, we would want all our interactions to be in the best interest of all neighbors.

It was my pleasure to serve you.

Don’t be silent.

Michael Hill, founder and president, LOS

For more information on the LOS, see the complete write-up at the Southern Poverty Law Center website:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/league-south

Listen to Michael Hill, founder of the LOS, at the LOS conference in August of 2015:

http://northcarolinaleagueofthesouth.com/dr-michael-hill-our-survival-as-a-people-redux/

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good

They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would

They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home

Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone

But I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned.

~ Rainy Day Women #12 and #35 by Bob Dylan

This song has been replaying in my head for the last week. It popped up when I read that Mitt Romney had selected Paul Ryan, a popular candidate with the Tea Party, as his running mate. Ryan’s budget plan includes not raising taxes on the wealthy and cutting social programs funding. He wants to turn Medicare into a partially privatized voucher system. He is of the camp that the wealthy are more deserving than the rest of us.

The song popped up when I read about the shooting at the Family Research Council (FRC), an organization that has spewed hatred about gays, calling them child molesters and suggesting that homosexuality be criminalized.  FRC president Tony Perkins blamed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for listing the FRC on its hate group watch list. He said, “And in those stories where it says the Family Research Council, it says they're a certified hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. We've seen that term used increasingly over the last two years and it marginalizes individuals and organizations, letting people feel free to go and do bodily harm to innocent people who are simply working and representing folks all across this country."

The SPLC responded that it had listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 "because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people -- not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage."

Their statement continued: “The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence."

After D.C. Shooting, Fingers Point over Blame

It frustrates me that conservatives use inflammatory, hateful language and marginalize groups of people and individuals all the time. And there has been violence as a result of their rhetoric.  But with one incident, they can turn around and blame a group that has tracked hate crimes for years, all hate crimes and all hate organizations, to benefit all of us. It’s the old do as I say, not as I do saw.

When I first saw the story, I wondered about the shooter. Most liberals carry signs, not guns. But perhaps the malignant language used by the president of the FRC when describing homosexuality was too much for Floyd Lee Corkins II, whose parents said he felt the FRC was unjust towards the gay and homosexual community. A strong and unwarranted response, but is anyone surprised? We are an armed society and shooting is an acceptable way of solving a problem or dispute. At least that is what many Americans believe, because they support the right to bear arms and minimal gun control.

Then I saw a story on the news a couple of days ago about the police shooting a mentally ill man on July 1^st in Saginaw, MI. The song popped into my head again.

Milton Hall, a forty-nine-year-old African-American, was agitated, and he was wielding a knife. When he refused to put it down, the police opened fire and shot him over thirty times. Thirty times! He was a known mentally ill person to the police, having been picked up in the past on vagrancy charges. They still shot him thirty times! They couldn’t have tased him? They couldn’t have loosed the police dog on him? No, they shot him thirty times! Thirty times! See a video that a bystander took of the shooting. Warning: it is very graphic.

Video Capture Michigan Man’s Shooting by Police

Can we talk about itchy trigger fingers? They are epidemic in America.

How many people have to be shot before we all rise up and say “no more?” It’s just getting crazier and crazier, and because it’s an election year, nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the middle of the map of the United States. Nor would the Republican dominated Congress pass any legislation concerning gun control. Do the conservatives and Tea Partiers realize that when you support the right to bear arms and also support minimal gun control that a lot of people who probably shouldn’t have guns are going to have them? That when a culture of gun ownership becomes more and more common, people from all walks of life are going to use guns more often and in more situations to resolve problems, differences, and disagreements? When you hope to operate above the law and common decency, others, people you think don’t deserve to, will follow you and act like you. And when you want the government to limit the rights of some but not others, like when you pass a constitutional amendment that says marriage is between a man and a woman, you will end up limiting your rights as well. We are either all equal or we are not. You can’t have it both ways.

Sometimes I feel I am witnessing the decline of a world power. Our country is disintegrating from the inside out. We’ve become more divisive than ever, and our politicians and corporate fat cats are feeding the frenzy. They are blatantly choosing business practices and passing legislation that favor the wealthy and leave the rest of us struggling. We are so far apart philosophically that I wonder if we will ever be able to reach a compromise.

It is the hatred and meanness behind the spewed rhetoric and lies. It is the way people wish ill of others because they don’t like them, are afraid of them, or judge them as less than, as in less equal or less worthy and deserving. I’m definitely more cynical at this age but I feel people are meaner, more self-serving, and that they value some lives over others. Whatever strides we made toward true equality, during the Civil Rights Era and because of the feminist movement, seem distant and tarnished in this era.

Then I remember Bob Dylan’s song. It’s meaning is layered. He could be talking about getting high, very popular in the sixties and apparently as popular today. That’s too simplistic in my mind. He was also talking about certain special, rare women in his life (#12 and #35) whose presence made him feel as if he’d been stoned.

But I also think he was talking about how everyone gets hit upside the head at one time or another when one least expects it. We are the same in that way: at some unexpected times in life, we will be stoned, in a moment of rare joy, love, and splendor or in a moment of tragedy, loss, and sadness.

It has nothing to do with who is more deserving or worthy. It happens to everyone, and trying to protect yourself with money, guns, and inflammatory, hateful language will not save you, because everybody must get stoned. It’s just a matter of how, when, and to what degree.

Wouldn’t it be better, knowing this, if we all shared compassion and empathy for one another and remembered that no one is more or less deserving? Let’s put away our weapons, harsh language, and lies. Let’s stop the violence. Let’s recognize and acknowledge that every person is equal, vulnerable, and imperfect. Everybody must get stoned. 

Demographic Evolution

For many centuries, when it was discovered that there were other lands beyond their own, people explored, traded goods and ideas, and adopted new words into their languages. Sometimes they conquered nations and ruled over them. Sometimes they enslaved the people. Other times they engaged in genocide.

Perhaps the concept of exploration and all the good and bad it embodied was needed for mankind to evolve. Now we are a global community. Progress is rapid and ideas, trends, and news are communicated in seconds. We are connected through technology and the ease of travel.

Cultures are becoming more common than different in industrialized nations, but regional and local cultural mores still operate. In such a world, I think it only matters what personal tastes an individual has in terms of where s/he wants to live, work, and socialize, but I suffer idealism.

This week on ABCNews.com I read an article about the shifting demographic in America. No doubt we knew a shift was coming. The Hispanic population has boomed, while middle class white people are aging, have been shrinking as a group, and have fewer children. Blacks remain at around twelve percent of the population, and Asians, also growing in number, are at around five percent of the total population.

The article, found here, http://abcnews.go.com/US/militias-hate-groups-grow-response-minority-population-boom/story?id=16370136#.T7epWhzeeuR, and titled “Hate Groups Grow as Racial Tipping Point Changes Demographics” states, “The data released this week revealed a tipping point in the country's demographic shift. For the first time in the country's history, more minority children were born than white children, setting the stage for an eventual non-white majority in America's population.”

This trend caused a growth in hate groups around the country. Their growth spiked in 2008 when President Obama was elected and continues to grow rapidly. Even white people who don’t consider themselves racist express fear about the changes in population. Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “It's a generalized feeling that 'this is not the country my Christian white forefathers built. We've got to take this country back.' It's not rancid straight ahead race hate, but it is very closely tied to race and the changing look of the country."

It’s an odd anxiety in my opinion, especially because of how this country was settled. First there was genocide and the stealing of land from the native people. Then slaves were brought from Africa when it was deemed Native Americans were not hearty enough to be enslaved. Then after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the dearth of people willing to pick crops and work for low wages in the service of others caused an influx of illegal immigrants. Corporate farmers and the wealthy looking for cheap household help brought them into the country first, then others followed, both legal and illegal, looking for opportunity. Now whites are anxious that the country they considered their home and playground is changing, and they are losing their power to control the situation. It reminds me of the constant feeling that must have run rampant in the South, at the height of slavery, that there were many more blacks than wealthy whites, and if the slaves were ever able to organize, a way of life might be lost. Many of the racist fears that still haunt black men today, like the belief that they have strong sexual desires for white women, grew out of that time. Of course, other historical events and economic trends ended that way of life, but the fear remains.

America doesn’t belong to just white people. It belongs to all Americans of every race and ethnicity. And our culture shows it. The food we eat, the music we listen to, the way we dance: they are all multicultural. Jazz, the blues, Rap, and Zydeco are all uniquely American as is modern dance, tap dance and Hip Hop.  Now Salsa is popular and many businesses display bilingual signage. We are a predominately Christian culture, but we’ve been influenced by many world religions. The popularity of yoga and meditation is an example of how we’ve been influenced by eastern religions and philosophies.

America is an interesting experiment in the merging of world cultures. It makes us unique and influential around the world. I can’t see how that can make people anxious, yet it is ever present.

I’m of Italian and Irish descent with a sprinkle of English and a large dollop of Australian. I’ve spent my adulthood in an interracial relationship with my husband who is black and Seminole Indian. My daughters are interracial –we often told people they were international babies whenever we were asked, “What are they?”  I have always lived a multicultural life. I haven’t chosen one culture or ethnicity over another or felt pressured to. I’ve enjoyed learning that there are different perspectives in the world and have let them open my mind, not close it. My husband is the same way. We’ve always been open to knowing people different than ourselves. That’s how we got together. My daughters feel the same way, too. They use all their cultural influences when creating art, music, dance and theater.

In the article on hate groups, Potok said that younger generations are more accepting of the demographic changes in America. He said 95 percent of them are accepting of interracial relationships. It’s a sign that race is not an important social construct to them. In just a few generations, maybe the color of one’s skin will be unimportant. We will have the chance to enjoy the uniqueness of our global culture instead of fighting over who is American due to race entitlement and who is not due to race prejudice and oppression. Just as cultures and mankind evolved for thousands of years through exploration, we are undergoing another evolution. I can only hope it will happen in my lifetime.