The US Supreme Court’s ruling that gays can marry was simply the frosting on a cake. It demonstrated that America had almost come to terms with one of its old phobias. After the election of Barack Obama I thought something similar had happened for “black” people. Suddenly they had become like everybody else or at least something close. But not long after Obama’s Mississippi’s old Democrats, who had abandoned a party that welcomed Civil Rights to defect to Republicans answered a survey which showed that 50 years after a similar Supreme Court Decision, Loving v. Virgina, 46 percent were of these new Republicans were still not reconciled to “miscegenation” (interracial sex). They wanted interracial marriages to be made illegal again.
So, while schadenfreude is beating the living daylights out of Donald Trump four-months-shy of a fearful reckoning, Trump is desperate to make the toppling of statutes to the Civil War’s losers another hot button issue to save his sorry, saggy skin.
I wrote a column two years ago suggesting that Donald Trump was worse than a racist. But something more amazing than the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage happened this week. The white Republican controlled Mississippi State Legislature just ordered that the State’s flag with its iconic stars and bars in the corner is to be changed.
America has not been color blind. It has simply been blind. I recommend this column to you from a recent New York Times contributor: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
In seconding this column I’ll add a short list of just a few of the horrors that have been inflicted on Black Americans.
In “Nightmare” the first chapter of the Autobiography of Malcolm X wrote “….still later, I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.”
When I was in high school I read Black Like Me by a white reporter who darkened his skin to hitchhike through the South. He had a hard time finding colored restrooms when he needed them and found them scrawled with financial offers from white men who wanted to have sex with black virgins.
A few years ago on This American Life a young black woman playing a slave in Washington’s Mount Vernon told an old white woman who was visiting that she was a slave only to have the woman tell her furiously that Washington didn’t own slaves.
With the advent of DNA a lot of white supremacists discovered to their horror that many of them had some African American in them. Under the laws of the old south “one drop” rule this made them Negroes. They are not happy.
Among blacks the stigma attached with darkness led them to discriminate against darker people. Toni Morrison on the recent American Masters I watched mentioned how black sororities, one of which she joined, on the campus of Howard University selected light or dark skinned pledges to fit in with everybody else. This has been black America’s dirty little semi-secret for generations.
Strom Thurmond who was more instrumental than most in directing white racists into the Republican Party had been a public school superintendent. He railed against polluting the white race with miscegenation. And yet he impregnated his family’s black maid and paid for the child to move away from South Carolina to attend school in faraway California.
Keep hiding in your closet President Trump and don’t look at your briefing books that explain how Russia has put bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Ignorance is bliss and you have led a blissfully ignorant life for 74 years. Let’s hope no more of those years are spent with you in the Oval Office.
