Reversing Discrimination

I owe you an apology, dear readers. I’ve left you hanging since January.  Maybe you think the Trump high jinks left me wordless. I can’t say they haven’t had an impact, but rendering me wordless was not the result. Rather, I’ve been writing and writing, and I am nearly done. I will publish a book soon, and I hope you will read it, not just to humor me, but because it is a small contribution to the conversation about race in America and is in honor of and dedicated to the women who have lost sons and daughters at the hands of biased police, vigilantes and white supremacist terrorists. 

Now a little bit about these last seven months:

There has hardly been a day when I haven’t had the news on for most of it. That isn’t the healthiest response to all that is going on, but, at the same time, there is so much going on. The difference in headlines in as little as an hour can be mind warping and tough to keep up with. Trump voters got what they wished for when they kept searching for ways to delegitimize former President Obama and candidate for president Hillary Clinton – lots of scandal and incompetence and chaos and election interference and maybe, no, probably, collusion and criminal activity. It’s like watching a really bad reality TV show. I’m expecting fisticuffs in the daily White House briefing any day now.

Trump supporters also wished for isolationism, and Trump has diminished our world presence and his status as the leader of the free world one stupid misstep, bullying word, and ignorant comment at a time. Trump had one success, the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch can barely hide his extreme right agenda.

Trump supporters denied climate change, and Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accord. Trump supporters were afraid of immigrants and wished to turn America white again, and AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, even beleaguered, in Trump’s opinion, showed his support of a bill presented by Senator Tom Cotton under the guise of immigration reform that, if passed, will assure America remains a white, (fundamental) Christian, and English speaking only majority. The beleaguered AG also penalized sanctuary cities, put a halt to consent decrees negotiated and agreed upon by cities and police departments to hold the police accountable in use of profiling and excessive force, and announced a crackdown on journalists and their sources in the federal government who leak information. Finally, and one wonders how someone so beleaguered can accomplish so much of his white nationalist agenda, the AG announced a call for attorneys to assist in an investigation and possible charges against universities who use affirmative action plans in their admissions  processes.

Watch what you wish for, Trump supporters. Fields of vegetables and orchards of fruit are going unpicked and are rotting due to a shortage of workers, while Trump successfully brought into the country 15,000 immigrants for his low-paying seasonal hospitality jobs. Obamacare hasn’t been repealed or replaced, and some of you are secretly relieved. The wall wasn’t built. The swamp wasn’t drained, rather, it is spilling over. Taxes for the wealthy weren’t cut – how was that going to help you again? The Legislative branch of government is even more dysfunctional and paralyzed than ever. And your lives haven’t changed one iota except that the air you breathe and the water you drink, cook with, and bathe in is about to get dirtier.

Affirmative Action, which has been around since the 1940s, has gone before the Supreme Court many times in the past forty years. Each time, it is ruled legal. Perhaps Trump believes the Supreme Court now has the votes to shoot it down. Or maybe this is an exercise in appeasing the Trump supporters who continue to show up at rallies to boost his ego.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Office of the General Counsel, defined affirmative action this way: Any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, that permits the consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities and/or to prevent the recurrence of discrimination in the future.

There are a couple of important things to remember: 1) there is no quota system, which many detractors claim is the reason the laws are unjust, and it specifically states “qualified individuals, ” which detractors seldom mention because it goes against their narrative of unfairness; 2) these laws protect these classes of individuals from future discrimination. Companies, municipalities, and universities create affirmative action plans based on criteria such as demographics, historical patterns and practices of recruitment, hiring, admissions, and retention, and current information about applicants. These plans are in place to level the playing field, and until the playing field is completely level and there is no threat of regression, they will continue to exist.

The concept of reverse discrimination is a tell on white privilege. It proves that if you are white, your expectations are shaped by that fact. You expect to be hired, accepted into college, approved for a mortgage, approved for a lease, to live where you want, to be hired in the field you are interested in pursuing, to have the best schools, to go wherever your heart desires, and to seldom hear the word “no.”

It also proves something else, and that is if you believe there is reverse discrimination, you know that discrimination exists and you approve of it. You know not everyone can hope for the things you take for granted, and you don’t care as long as you get yours even at the expense of others. People with this mindset accept privilege and worry that equality will diminish their status rather than lift the status of others to equal status.

The Declaration of Independence opens with this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The use of “men” does not exclude women and gender non-conforming individuals, nor does it only refer to white Christians. Man, or mankind, is inclusive, not exclusive.

The preamble of the Constitution states: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Trump administration is erasing the best hopes and ideals of this country and is flouting its founding principles.

The response is to resist, persist, contribute to the national conversation on defining who we are as a country, be an active civic and critically thinking citizen, disavow discrimination of any kind, let Trump supporters know our vision of America is inclusive and we welcome them to the conversation, support the individuals who are willing to run for elected office and who are willing to go to the mat to fight for our best selves and ideals for America, stop in-fighting about who is and isn’t progressive enough, remember your own privilege and check it, and vote in every single election. We got this.

Trump supporter

Chicago Tribune

The Greatest is Dead

Muhammad Ali died this week.  His death represented a watershed moment personally and for our country and the world. He was one of the movers and shakers of the era in which I grew up. His life affected my life, my thinking and my understanding of race in America.

I was the child of an Italian-American father who only learned English when he went to school and a mother who was a WWII war bride of Irish descent from Australia. We were solidly trapped in the class of the working poor since neither of my parents graduated high school. The concept of white middleclass America was fuzzy in my child’s eyes.

Clearer was the circumstance of my father’s best friend Harold who, like Ali, was the grandson of slaves. I understood his concern when he told us to stay behind at the house while he walked down to the grocery store to pick up rolls for our dinner. He did not want to cause us trouble, but I know my dad respected his request because he did not want to cause Harold trouble in his mostly white rural community where he moved after retirement into the house his grandmother left him and my father was helping him renovate.

I watched boxing from an early age with my dad. It’s one of the few things I shared with him. He watched boxing by throwing punches at the TV, jumping up and down out of his chair, pacing, yelling, and clapping. I adopted his raucous spectatorship and still watch boxing with my husband Ronald. Ronald, who has always been protective of me, has repeatedly said I would not like watching boxing live in the arena. He said you hear the punches and see sweat and blood fly. I agree with him. Often one of the things I am yelling at the screen is for the referee to stop the fight.

I remember watching Ali fight, when he was Cassius Clay and when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. I heard adults talking about his name change and then again when he registered as a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam War.  He was stripped of his title and his license was suspended. People were angry with him. When he returned to boxing three years later after the Supreme Court reversed his conviction, some wanted to watch his fights in the hope that he would lose. But he disappointed them by winning.

He kept speaking up on the right side of history; although few people understood what side of history he was on and what side they were on. Maybe he wasn’t thinking that at the time. Most people don’t wake up one day and say, “I’m choosing the right side of history. I’m going to change the world.” They simply respond to the situations presented to them, and, after the fact, the historians and pundits decide who changed what and who had the most influence.

I wonder which people will be considered the movers and shakers of these times? Certainly President Obama will be chosen. Maybe Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be looked upon the same way in the future as the first presumptive female presidential nominee and maybe as the first female president.

Trump, on the other hand, is clearly on the wrong side of history. He promotes racism, hatred, prejudice, violence, selfishness, and narcissism. His supporters followed him to the wrong side, claiming political correctness was dead.

Of course, there is political correctness and then there is blatant racism and discrimination. Trump supporters were really choosing the latter, and I do not think they chose it mistakenly. Trump said of Judge Curiel, “I’m building the wall, I’m building the wall. I have a Mexican judge. He’s of Mexican heritage. He should have recused himself, not only for that, for other things.”

Within the same week he said at a rally, while pointing to a black man in the crowd (someone who said he was not a supporter), “Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?"

The GOP establishment is now walking an unknown path: the way to preserving the GOP while distancing the party from an avowed racist.  What a treacherous journey they have ahead of them, particularly because they have relied on racists as supporters since Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

One day, sometime after Ali retired, white Americans declared him a hero. He had become a shadow of his former self, his body holding his mind hostage. They forgot he was physically powerful and dominated his opponents in the ring. They forgot they cheered for the other boxers to beat him. They forgot how he spoke out against racism and white supremacy.  They forgot he was a black nationalist. They forgot how they hated him for converting to Islam and changing his name from a slave name to a name with spiritual meaning and identity. President GW Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom.

Maybe, as I’ve often heard, our memories grow sweeter with the passage of time.  Me? I always thought Muhammad Ali was an amazing and intelligent athlete, who sometimes let his ego choose his fighting strategy, and he was a person who was courageous enough to tell his truth no matter how people reacted.

Sometime during this election campaign and the deaths of several icons of my era (Ali, Prince, Bowie and others), I lost my mind and all understanding of the world. Maybe I never understood it in the first place.

I watched Trump turn the campaign into the art of the deal, playing the role of the modern PT Barnum who once said, “There's a sucker born every minute,” and “Money is in some respects life's fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.”

I watched millions of first time voters “feel the Bern” and heard one say that if Bernie Sanders did not become the Democratic nominee, she refused to vote for the lesser of two evils (Hillary Clinton) because it was unfair to make her vote for a candidate who was not her first choice. I wondered as I listened when they would reinstitute civics classes in high school and teach about personal sacrifice for the greater good. I wondered if Bernie would choose the right side of history and concede, perhaps this evening at the close of the polls.

Then last night the AP and NBC projected Secretary of State Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee. I rushed to change my Face book profile photo from a glum, cranky pants expression to one of absolute glee. I am elated we reached this historic moment in our country, 36 years after Iceland elected their first female president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and 50 years after Indira Gandhi was elected the first female prime minister of India, serving until she was assassinated in 1984. It feels similar to my excitement in 2008 when President Obama clinched the nomination and then won the election. As a woman, a spouse in an interracial relationship, and the mother of biracial daughters, these moments are tangible.

Perhaps if Trump supporters could tell the truth about how scared they are in a world in which they feel irrelevant and disenfranchised, we can begin to heal this country. We can assure them they and we are all Americans and that we have more in common than they believe. We can promise them no one is going to take away their way of life or their guns or their religion or their safety in public bathrooms; we simply want equality and the ability to live our lives and our truths, too.

Telling the truth is something all of us need to do more often, even at the risk of others not accepting you or it.

Mohammad Ali knew that. He lived it.

GettyImages

The Ugly American

I first remember hearing this phrase when I was in my teens, back in the 1970s. Originally it was the title of a novel published in 1958 and a film released in 1963, starring Marlon Brando. According to Wiki, The Ugly American “depicts the failures of the US diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language, culture and customs and refusal to integrate was in marked contrast to the polished abilities of East bloc diplomacy and led to Communist diplomatic success overseas.”

The term is apropos in today’s social and political contexts.

When I see the hatred and vitriol spewed from the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and Carly Fiorini, my stomach turns. Worse is the rabid applause and cheers from their supporters. Trump’s supporters attacked a Black Lives Matter protester at an Alabama campaign stop.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Hatred and fear ooze like toxic waste over the landscape of our country. It is overwhelming but it is also deadly and violent.

My husband Ronald and I went to see the movie Trumbo. For those who don’t know who Dalton Trumbo was, he was one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, that is, until the House Un-American Activities Committee charged him with being a Communist.

It was a dark time in our history. The Cold War was raging, and America became paranoid. That meant people who did not share the very narrow definition of patriotism were subjected to investigation and possible prison sentences. Trumbo was one of many who served a sentence. Many of the accused weren’t Hollywood royalty but regular folk like teachers and firefighters. Some lost their careers, their homes, their families, and even their lives.

The House Un-American Activities Committee conducted these investigations from 1938 – 1975. Neighbors turned in neighbors, friends turned in friends, and many people believed that doing so protected the freedoms we so often take for granted in this country.

But the opposite occurred, because our First Amendment Right that guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion was under attack.

Trumbo said, “Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.”

Today we are dangerously close to repeating history. Some GOP candidates have called for the shutting down of Mosques and even internment of all Muslims. Today Donald Trump announced his new proposal that would prevent ALL Muslims from entering this country, even American citizens who travel outside the country.

One of his supporters, standing in line to watch Trump speak in Mount Pleasant, NC, said of Muslim Americans, ”Ship them all out.”

Historically, we have done this before.  We interred Japanese Americans during WWII, some of whom had been Americans for generations. Jim Crow systematically segregated and contained black Americans through socio-economic oppression and meted out violent and deadly retribution on those who did not comply. The Trail of Tears, the forced migration of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to Oklahoma, led to thousands of Native Americans perishing during the arduous journey.

It’s important to remember that every new wave of immigration in our country caused paranoia and fear. Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants were all considered dangerous to “the American way of life.”

What is the “American way of life” if it does not include the diversity of our citizens and a mainstream culture that is the melange of multicultural and sub-cultural contributions?

We are not a white country. We are not a Christian country. We are a country that is predominately of Euro-ethnic heritage, the majority of which are Christian, but that does not represent all of us.

Whenever a whole group of individuals is demonized we are hurting our country and our citizens. In this case, because many people refuse to be inclusive and, instead, feed their own paranoia and fear, we are letting extreme Islamic terrorists win. They count on irrational responses, and there are many Americans who are more than willing to comply.

In addition such hatred, fear, and paranoia feed the virulent hate of a growing group of radicalized white citizens who perpetrate their own terrorist acts against other Americans, such as the murder of nine black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and the murder of three and injury of nine at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. America is amnesic on these terrorist acts because the San Bernardino terrorist act better fits a narrative that includes arming more citizens rather than passing common sense gun control and blaming one group of people for terror in our country.

The ugly Americans: people applauding the murders of unarmed black men; turning their backs on Syrian refugees who are fleeing unimaginable circumstances; shouting their hatred of fellow Americans who choose to worship or not worship in ways that are not congruent with fundamental Christianity.

What’s worse is the hatred directed toward President Obama at this time when we should be standing united behind him. How dare Donald Trump, or any of the other candidates, think he can out strategize the President when he doesn’t have access to the information the President has nor the large number of experts advising him.

I can’t see how that will help us stay safe, especially when we don’t share the same definition of what it means to be safe. There is a sector of America who believes safety lies in removing everyone who doesn’t fit the narrow and untrue definition of American – white and Christian, in whatever manner it takes to get rid of them.

How can we discover who the radicals are when we are busy damning whole groups of people, most of whom are innocent?

President Obama said, “When we travel down that road [of discrimination] we lose.”

Albert Einstein once said,  “Insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results.” We are dangerously close to repeating history and the outcome won’t be different.

The Ugly American 

More Gray Matters

It’s the time of year when I can’t get up in the mornings and I don’t want to go to bed at night until sleep finally finds me which is often well after midnight. I’m restless and glum. Not that winters down here in NC are anything close to what they are in NY where I spent the first 50 years of my life. This winter in upstate NY is a constant barrage of sub-zero temperatures and blustery snowstorms. We had our storm in NC, sure. A few inches of snow and everything was shut down for days. The trash was not picked up, the mail was not delivered, and the snowplows didn’t arrive until the sun had done most of their job of clearing the streets.

I didn’t mind the time spent indoors. I like my solitude. It’s the short days and the reminder that mortality comes to all living things that has walloped my resoluteness.

I suppose that should make me hopeful because some of the crazy ideologies circulating the media these days have taken on a life of their own. Their impending demise should be cause for a premature celebration. Yet I can’t arouse the energy for even one “hoorah.”

I feel anger brewing beneath the surface when I think about recent deaths, like the murder of Jordan Davis because one drunk guy carrying a gun decided he and his friends were playing their music too loudly, and how certain people continue to get away with murder because gun companies want to sell more guns and they don’t care what they are used for. They know what they are used for. They convince legislatures to pass vague “stand your ground” and “shoot first” laws as if owning a gun is a more important freedom than the freedoms of safety and place. Every American has the right to go to the store, wear a hoodie, play music, sit in an SUV, buy Skittles at a convenience store, and walk home in the rain. Not just white Americans. Not just wealthy Americans.

That includes being confident of being served if one goes to a restaurant to eat dinner or to a dry cleaner to drop off clothes. Why should one be turned away if one has the money to purchase the service? Oh, excuse me, religious freedom. Did I forget that one? Religious freedom is the freedom to worship as one chooses, not the freedom to force one’s beliefs on another or choose not to serve those you believe don’t share your religious beliefs. Your service to someone who is gay or a different ethnicity or race is not considered abetment if that’s how you see it. Conservative Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill, but that hasn’t stopped other states from considering a similar law.

I feel the burden of mankind on my shoulders.  I can’t shake it this time of year. It’s the feeling that some things never change. Like the “isms” will never truly go away and that mankind can’t help but be corrupted by power and wealth. It’s depressing.

I sought diversion and turned on TCM in time to catch the 1940 movie Hullabaloo, about a has-been radio actor who turns to his three daughters, children of three different wives, to revive his career. It starred two actors from the Wizard of Oz: Frank Morgan and Billie Burke, so it captured my attention. A black actor playing the role of bellhop sang two beautifully rendered songs: Carry Me Back to Old Virginny and Vesti la Giubba from I Pagliacci.

I searched the cast listing to see who the man was as I couldn’t recall ever seeing him in a movie before, and I’ve seen many, many movies from the 1940s and 1950s, two of my favorite movie eras.

His name was Charles Holland. He had roles in just three movies, one role minor enough where it was not credited. My search for more information resulted in no photos, no wiki page, and no full bio on him. The only other tidbit was that he died at age 77 in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands.

That news made me sad, too. Despite my love of movies from that era, I acknowledge that the lives portrayed in Hollywood were, and mostly still are, white lives. The movies were in black and white, but the actors, with the exception of certain roles like maid, slave, butler, or bellhop, were white, and the stories were based in white cultural mores.

That started to change in the late 1950s when America’s social conscience awakened and movies like Sidney Poitier’s The Defiant Ones came out in 1958. Of course, it was one more push toward equality that never truly came to fruition. I just read about the “hullabaloo” caused by the casting of Michael B. Jordan as one of the Fantastic Four in the next sequel of the franchise. The movie remake of Annie awakened a few racists. One tweeted: They're redoing the Annie movie and making the little girl black. The fuck gonna be going on next? A black snow white????

Some fans can’t picture the characters Annie and Johnny Storm as African Americans so, in alignment with what white privilege affords to those who have it, they have made their dissatisfaction known with great trumpeting and fanfare. I am sorry their imaginations are stunted.

Yes, it’s exhausting, maddening, and outrageous, but I can’t give it up. Instead, after dwelling on it until I can’t any longer, I allow myself those diversions, another one being obsessing about my hair, a symptom of another ism.

I’ve been growing out my dyed hair since October 2013. It’s a slow process, even for my quickly growing hair, and one that is becoming more painful, though I retain my excitement of reaching the goal of accepting myself just as I am. You can read my first two installments at: Gray Matters and Matters: Gray and Otherwise.

Though I am resolute in my decision, I still feel the sting of envy as my friends continue to dye and cover their gray hairs. There is an invisible, self-imposed pressure to conform to the standard of beauty that frowns upon natural hair.

One day in the car, I turned down the visor and stared at myself in the mirror. “My hair looks terrible,” I lamented as I ran my fingers through it. The stripe is growing larger but, as the demi-permanent dye fades, it is not the defined stripe I originally imagined and that permanent hair color makes.

“Yeah, it does,” Ronald responded with the truthfulness I appreciate even when it hurts. “I liked your hair short before,” he continued, “and then you grew it long.”

I smiled because a few months ago he had put forth the argument that I shouldn’t go short. “Well, I guess I would have been almost bald if I had cut it when I first started to grow it out. Maybe it would work now.”

“Yes,” he replied.

Not quite yet, though. I think I need to go a little longer before I chop.

Here I am with my boy Ru. We will share similar hair color when I am all done.

Now I am sitting in our dark and unheated living room typing the rest of this post before the battery on my Mac dies. Another polar vortex hit NC yesterday. We woke up this morning to no electricity and no heat. The trees were bending to the ground by the weight of the ice coating their branches, and the window screens on the eastern side of the house were frozen over. It didn’t seem so bad in the daylight while my Nook and Mac still had battery power.

When I realized my Nook would not last too much longer, I picked up a trade paperback I’ve been meaning to read titled Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. After a few pages I got that excitement I get when I want to share with Ronald, so I started reading aloud, as I often did in college, either to him or into a tape recorder for Ray, who was visually handicapped. I read from the Harriet Tubman book for almost two hours, until my voice began to give way.

We ended up at the movies, because they had power. Then we went to dinner. We relaxed at the table until we saw lots of people crowding the lobby. We drove toward home through this block that had lights and that block that didn’t. We arrived to the still darkened neighborhood, our house cloaked in darkness. Ronald has wandered into the bedroom, and here I sit finishing up this post before the Mac goes dead.

It’s another diversion in a world of gray matters.

This is what it looked like off my front porch.

Amendment One: I See Hateful People

Hateful. Ma called me that when I was little. The word summoned the image of darkness oozing out of my pores, crawling along my scalp, sliding down the strands of my snarled hair, until it filled the room like a black void. My hatefulness was the manifestation of wanting to be loved, demanding it, and wanting to destroy the world if I couldn’t have it. I felt the unfairness of Ma’s inability, probably due to postpartum depression, to bond with me. I emitted a mountain of emotion for so small a child, and my memories of it are still crisp. I know hateful when I see it.

North Carolinians, not every single one, but a majority, have shown their hatefulness, and it feels like a black void blotting out the Carolina blue sky and sunshine. Amendment One, a constitutional modification that states a marriage is between a man and a woman, was overwhelmingly passed on May 8^th. The next day the rain poured down, thunder rumbled, lightening cracked open the sky, and the darkness at ground level caused me to switch on lights. “God must be crying,” I mused.

I thought that because God was plopped right into the middle of the debate. Both sides were quoting the Old Testament.

 As a vocal liberal, I’m sure most people don’t know that I am a born again Christian, as in I accepted Jesus as my savior in a private moment of epiphany. I live in contentment because of my choice. Until I wrote this post, I did not share that fact with many other people. I don’t shout it in the streets, thump my Bible, practice religion, go to church, and attempt to convert others, or tell people that God has spoken to me and that I am delivering a message. I also don’t tell people they are wrong if they do any of that. Everyone has a right to worship, or not, in the way they choose.

I try not to judge others, though I think we can all admit that can be difficult at times given our own imperfectness. I try to show compassion and love, as Jesus did, for all of mankind, maybe because I felt so unloved as a child.

So I am not condemning the people of North Carolina for their decision to pass this amendment. I condemn the amendment itself. I am deeply saddened and frightened by its passage and by the opinions and judgments expressed about the people this amendment targets, the GLBT population.

I saw the hatefulness in the remarks of a Fayetteville pastor who encouraged his parishioners to beat their children if they displayed behaviors, attitudes, or dress that veered from traditional gender roles. I saw hatefulness in the words spoken by a state senator’s wife who said the amendment was important to pass because the white race was diminishing and that “white people founded this country” and “it should be the country they founded.”

When the civil rights of one group are taken away, we are all diminished by the action. It has nothing to do with God. It has everything to do with discrimination, oppression, and hatred. It has to do with treating peers as unequal, as less than. 

Once it is socially acceptable to forcefully take the civil rights of one group away, it becomes easier and easier to target other groups.

Read my post “On Being a Creative Maladjusted” to learn how quickly Hitler rose to power and targeted groups for oppression, imprisonment, and death:

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/04/on-being-creative-maladjusted.html

Look how Jim Crow laws gave permission to supposedly good people to torture and lynch blacks and prevent interracial couples from marrying. Look how government supported involuntary sterilization took away the reproductive rights of thousands of citizens. The darkness, the hatefulness, the fear, and the anger grow and grow inside people that might otherwise be fine citizens. A mob mentality takes over and erases all personal thoughts and actions.

The Southern cultural heritage is complicated and unresolved in my opinion. I’ve told people from down here that I am offended by the Confederate flag and what it symbolizes, and they’ve answered, “But that’s my heritage.” What does that mean, though? Do they acknowledge that their history is one of slavery, oppression, violence, and secession? Do they still cling to those beliefs? No one has ever given me a straight answer, so I can only go by what I see.

I see hatefulness. I see fear. I see aggression. I see the Southern stare.

Ronald and I coined the phrase “Southern stare” to describe what we often experience (and what I have often written about in my blog). The Southern stare is the way some people look at us. They bore their eyes into us, turn their heads, slow their pace, twist their bodies to get a better view, veer their cars across lanes, drop whatever else they are engaged in such as conversation or eating, and stare. They don’t speak to us or acknowledge us in any way. They just stare.

That leads me to believe, despite seeing quite a few interracial couples walking around besides us, that it still is not accepted. The amendment that made interracial marriages illegal in North Carolina was codified in 1875 and not removed from the state constitution until 1971, four years after the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws illegal.  Is anti-miscegenation considered part of the Southern heritage?

Another thing we discovered is insularity. We are called Yankees. We are considered outsiders. We’ve been told we don’t belong here. It is apparent that since we don’t go to church, we are considered unworthy of friendship, and that’s been our experience with people of all races. It’s been difficult to make friends and acquaintances.

“Why stay there?” you ask. We aren’t sure that we will. We’ve asked ourselves that question a lot lately, because we feel that we’ve given it enough time but things haven’t gone as we had hoped. We’ve grown tired of conversations that are racist and one-sided, like people calling President Obama “your president” or telling my husband that they hate Tiger Woods, challenging him to disagree. We’ve grown wary of people who talk about carrying guns and shooting others or who veer their car in our direction as if they mean to hit us. (See my posts “Profiling Fatality”:

 http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/04/profiling-fatality-3-demonization-of.html

and “Do the Right Thing”:

 http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2011/10/do-right-thing.html

to read about those two experiences).

Then we remember that we experienced racism in our old town up north, too.

One thing we both believe in is that we have a right to choose where we want to live. It is one of our civil rights and we exercise them with the belief that they are inalienable. We believe in them so strongly that we will fight for our right to exercise them. See my post “The Legacy of Racism” that talks about our housing discrimination suit: http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2011/08/legacy-of-racism.html

However, we have been disturbed by the passage of Amendment One. It is a sign that civil rights can be taken away at will, with ill intent, and with the purpose of discriminating against targeted groups.

I don’t expect every person to like me or for me to like every person. That’s how humans are – some people have interests or circumstances in common that draw them together. Oftentimes relationships are formed based on cultural and racial commonality or similar values. Dislike is often caused by dissimilarity. But just because you don’t like someone or how someone lives, doesn’t mean you should act against him, especially if he does not cause harm to others.

Hate is different. Hate is a strong emotion. It takes energy to hate another human being. Hatred has the power to harm. Like in the case of taking away civil rights from groups who are different from the majority.

A lot of North Carolinians are upset about the bad press the state has gotten in the media. They are proud of the state, and I can see why. We wanted to claim this state as our new home. It is physically beautiful. And there is that whole thing about heritage, which, as a recent migrant, I am still trying to understand.

I watched comments fly back and forth on Facebook. People expressed offense over the meanness of certain comments that belittled all citizens of North Carolina, and I agree, there were some over-the-top ones and some terribly offensive generalizations made. There are very strong emotions on both sides of the fence.

People are shocked by the passage of this amendment now, at this time in our history.  The amendment has consequences for more than just the group of people it targets, and it diminishes our social ethos. Why would anyone deny another person the right to a mutual, consensual, loving, committed, stable relationship that protects both partners? In my mind, there was never a reason to put it out for a vote, other than to use hatred against a group and to wield power to keep them oppressed.

But then another thought entered my mind as the comments continued to fly back and forth. It isn’t the nicest thing I could think of to say, but it just seems right: When you bare your ass in public, don’t get upset when people talk about how big it is.

Amendment One is North Carolina’s ass hanging out for everyone to see and comment on. That isn’t said in hate. It is said with disappointment, sadness, fear, and wonder if we should stay in a state that can take away civil rights and use God and the Bible as the excuse to do it. This is not the first time and probably not the last time. There is a proud heritage of taking people’s civil rights away in this state.

I see hateful people. I’d like to think God had a really good cry after Amendment One was passed.