Being Black and hearing republicans laughing it up at watermelon jokes at my expense [View all]

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Last edited Mon Oct 28, 2024, 06:52 PM - Edit history (5)

...how that feels after a lifetime stretching from the promise of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, to the revival of Jim Crow racism as a political play in the Trump era.

We were so close to turning the corner on all that, and purging most of the old racists through attrition like we did in my old grocery workplace.

This is Jim Crow cosplay which intends to be a permanent feature in our social discourse. The way we drove most of the kinds of abominations underground after the material gains of the Civil Rights era was through public shaming and humiliation of regressive bigots who insisted on continuing the divisive nonsense.

There is no effective legal recourse. This is on us to drive it to the ground again, and there are more of us out here today who will make it clear they aren't tolerating any of it.

I recall integration of a particular school in the South in that segregated past where ALL of the white students were pulled out of classes by their parents when a handful of black youth were admitted. Those black youth attended classes in a virtually empty school that year.

The next year, however, the majority of the white students had been allowed to return - and time and history marched on.

But that progression didn't happen in a vacuum of indifference or apathy. There needed to be leadership from the top to make clear that the nation wasn't going back to forced segregation and the discriminating against minority Americans with impunity.

It really is remarkable how our insistence on progressive change has the potential to move mountains of resistance, in the end. History tells us this.


___When I think of watermelon, btw, I immediately recall my mother telling me how she would spend summers in her youth in Molena, Ga, working with her father and sharecroppers in a melon field, and how she would love to crack open a warm watermelon and eat it with the juice running all down her front.

Just a beautifully evocative memory that reminds me of the awful distortions that these intended slurs contain in their denial of the wonderfulness of Black people's lives, our actual joy.