| Manhattan, Lower East Side, 1983, the slogan calling to mind 1979's Greensboro Massacre. Tech data: Nikon FM, 24mm Nikkor, Tri-X, probably at 800 for D-76. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1983, 2015. (Click image to view it full size.)
*
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YES,
THE SOUTH is every bit as malevolently Nazified as suggested by the
jailing of a young black woman and her white assistant for pulling down a white supremacist banner in Charleston, South Carolina.
But it's not just the South. It's the whole damn United States.
The
brutality of its racism and its kindred toxins of xenophobia, ethnic
hatred and class prejudice was the one enduring lesson of the 177
(mostly miserable) months I involuntarily spent in the South during the
post-New York City years of my childhood and early manhood. It's why I
have not set foot in the South since 1969, and it's why I have no
intention of ever going back.
However
it was my subsequent years elsewhere that taught me the bigoted
hatefulness of USian whites is truly ubiquitous. Though its expression
may vary from region to region, its underlying malice is the same
whether one is in Michigan, in New Jersey, in the Pacific Northwest or
even in some parts of Manhattan.
Nor does it surprise me the Confederate battle flag – the same icon of oppression the breathtakingly courageous Bree Newsome
yanked from one of the region's commonplace and officially defiant
memorials to slavery and genocide – has become an international symbol
of der ΓΌbermenschen – the self-proclaimed “Aryan master race.”
After
all, the Confederacy was our benighted species' first attempt to
formally establish a system of government based exclusively on white
supremacy. It predated the Nazis' Third Reich by 72 years. That's why.
contrary to the Southern apologists' claims, any Confederate banner is
unabashedly malignant, its public display the visual equivalent of shouting “nigger” in the face of any black who passes by. That's why the battle flag is now Hitler-saluted and zieg heiled by Nazis everywhere including Ukraine.
And
that's why Newsome and James Ian Tyson could no longer abide it flying –
as if in smirking triumph – over the city made infamous by the most
recent U.S. racial atrocity.
***
ASTUTE
READERS WILL note I have linked to two mainstream-media reports
describing the laudable deed done by Newsome and her protest-comrade
Tyson. That's because the reports are written from differing
perspectives – one from South Carolina, the other from New York City –
and because each therefore contains details the other lacks.
The same is true of the alternative media report linked here,
which unfortunately spells Newsome's companion's name as “Dyson”
despite the fact it is spelled “Tyson” in every other dispatch I have
read.
Normally that would cause me to reject the “Dyson”
piece for reportorial incompetence. But apart from the apparent
misspelling, it provides additional, very interesting information about
Newsome herself. And knowing the South, I can rationalize the spelling
conflict as likely the result of how so many Southerners often confuse
the pronunciations of D and T.
Alas,
without a means of contacting Newsome's colleague directly, there is no
way I can confirm which spelling is correct. So I'll follow the lead of
the Associated Press, which I know to be generally trustworthy on such
matters, and I'll continue to spell his name “Tyson,” with profuse
apologies if I am wrong.
Meanwhile
Newsome and Tyson are each facing up to three years in prison on
misdemeanor changes of defacing a monument, which means they were
fortunate to have been allowed to make bail so quickly.
Because
of the rampant racism in Southern jails, anyone arrested on civil
rights charges is in potentially deadly danger, not just from the guards
but from racist inmates also. Given the violation of law with which
Newsome and Tyson are charged, had either of the two spent much time
behind bars, they'd have been prime targets.
Particularly
during the Civil Rights Movement era, white jail guards routinely
bribed white racist inmates with cigarettes, food and additional
privileges to beat and rape men and women who had been arrested in civil
rights protests. The persistence of racist violence throughout the
nation, especially as perpetrated by federally militarized local police
departments, strongly suggests such jailhouse practices continue
unabated.
That's
essentially what happened to a white Congress of Racial Equality
activist named Phil Bacon in 1962 at Knoxville, Tennessee's Knox County
Jail. Bacon was beaten into a near-coma, and the resultant injuries
hospitalized him for some time – if I remember correctly, for three or
four weeks. A white woman whose name I have since forgotten, herself a
civil rights activist, was similarly savaged by white inmates in the
jail's women's section.
The Knox County Jail was part of my Southern experience too. Arrested in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to write a racist lie, I spent most of the night of 3-4 June 1963 in one of its filthy, piss-reeking cell blocks before being allowed to post bail.
***
MY
MOST REVEALING encounter with Southern hospitality occurred not during
the overt antagonisms of the Civil Rights Movement but nearly two
decades earlier, in the spring of 1944, when the entire nation was
supposedly united in an all-out effort to defeat the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo
Axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.
During
most of 1943 my father was the acting vice-president for operations of a
New York-based corporation called American Houses, the global pioneer
in the manufacture of prefabricated housing. Before Pearl Harbor it had
been building prefab single-family dwellings throughout the United
States, and now it was erecting barracks on the nation's newly expanded
military bases. Because of the grueling intensity of the war effort, my
father was often working 16-hour days.
But
my birthmother, a pampered and self-obsessed daughter of the
Republican/isolationist bourgeoisie, refused to believe there was any
(legitimate) reason for a “gentleman” to spend so much time on the job.
Fully
cognizant of the damage her behavior would do his career, she stormed
into my father's office atop the General Electric Building in Midtown
Manhattan, interrupted a vital meeting with War Production Board
officials and staged a wildly disruptive, utterly mortifying tantrum –
toppling chairs, overturning water pitchers, hurling stacks of documents
and shrieking out the spittle-punctuated venom of a (false and
ludicrous) accusation he was working such long hours not to help fight
fascism but to cover up a love affair with his personal secretary.
Just
as my mother intended, the American Houses board of directors
immediately canceled my father's pending formal appointment to the
vice-presidential post in which he had been serving. Because the
corporate world of that era regarded one's choice of a wife as a
demonstration of one's personnel management skills, it would not promote
men who were wedded to women who later proved themselves to be publicly
vengeful harridans.
But the consequences of my mother's vindictiveness were far worse than she
had anticipated. Not only was my father booted from the executive
suite; he – and therefore his wife and I his son – were also exiled from
New York City. He was sent to manage a plant in Jacksonville, Florida –
the USian capitalist equivalent of exile to a Siberian hydroelectric
power station, actually worse than Siberia because of the jungle-humid
subtropical heat and the relentlessly predatory reptiles and insects.
Our
new home was an upscale Jacksonville apartment complex called
Catherine's Court, a cluster of recently erected red brick buildings in
an attractively landscaped yard that fronted on the Saint John's River.
Fenced, gated and locked, the tenants-only yard included an unsupervised
playground with a large sandbox, probably 12 feet by 12 feet, filled
with the white sand found on Floridian beaches.
It
was there in that sandbox I learned what the South is really about,
though now years later I would have to say the lesson exemplifies the
attitudes that define not just one region of the United States but
nearly the entire nation – particularly now that hard times permanently
imposed by capitalist austerity provide a convenient excuse for any
expressions of malevolence the Ruling Class cannot readily dismiss as
“lone gunman” incidents.
As
to the Catherine's Court sandbox, I think I had played in it several
times before, but I had always been alone, and in any case my
recollections are typical of those from early childhood in their
frequent and often frustrating lack of contextual details.
However on this particular morning three other boys were there. They had a
child-sized set of garden tools, a rake, shovel and hoe with light brown
wooden handles and red-painted metal heads plus a smaller all-metal shovel,
also red. I don't remember our conversation, though it's my impression
they were building something, maybe a sand-castle like you'd build at
the beach.
The
day was cloudy, which diminished the usual sun-glare off the river, but
it was also hot, and the fact I was out playing in the locked yard by
myself suggests we had
been living at Catherine's Court for several months, at least long
enough to have become comfortable with our surroundings, which means it was probably the spring of 1944, and I with my Aries birthday was probably four years old.
As
children do, I'm sure the other boys and I quickly established a
hierarchy of age and size: they were older, five and six and maybe
seven, and they were physically much bigger. I was small for my years,
slender, dark haired, dark eyed, urban pale and vaguely Semitic-looking
in contrast to their deeply tanned Aryan blue-eyed blondness. But I had
that assertiveness New York City kids learn in earliest infancy, and I
suppose I made it obvious I would not be intimidated by the presumptive
superiority of their ages and statures.
Much
of this contextual detail is, as noted above, the product of logical
conjecture rather than specific recollection. The memory of what
happened in the sandbox does not come into sharp focus until the three
boys wanted to pull down my blue cotton overalls to see if I had a “Jew
pee-pee.”
I
did not. Though circumcision had been a medical commonplace in the
United States of that era, I am one of those many males born c.
1939-1943 who were left uncircumcised in response to the widespread fear
either the U.S. would turn officially fascist or the Nazis would win
the war. Hence I would have easily passed the “Jew pee-pee” test.
But
I had been raised in a dominantly progressive environment – my father
had been a Communist during the 1930s and remained staunchly Marxian
beneath his corporate disguise – and even as a child my sensibilities
were outraged by the prospect of being forcibly disrobed. Somehow I
convinced the trio – for by now I recognized them as unequivocal enemies
– that de-panting me would get them in terrible trouble with their
parents.
For
a few blessed moments I thought I had escaped what to me was their
inexplicable belligerence. Perhaps if I was motionless and quiet I could
slip away from the sandbox without again provoking them.
But
then these three native white Southern kids – these children of parents
who apart from their Southern heritage were presumably the
socioeconomic equals of my father – decided to bury my head in the sand
because I “talked funny.”
I
tried to run but never had a chance. Two of these Future Klansmen of
America held me down while the third dug a hole in the sandbox with the
red shovel. I remember realizing I would not be able to
breathe once my head was in that hole. I remember watching with
wordless, stomach-falling-into-a-bottomless-pit terror as the digger
deepened the hole. The sand, beach-white and dry on the surface, was
dark and damp in the hole's bottom.
When
the hole was big enough to bury my entire head, the digger set aside
the red shovel and the biggest boy grabbed my feet and stood me on my
head while the other two held my arms. I kicked and fought and bit and
screamed and pleaded and cried but they were too strong and they forced
me face-first into the hole and began kicking in the sand and then my
eyes and mouth and nose were full of sand and I couldn't see or breathe.
And then suddenly I was free again and spitting sand out of my mouth
and snorting it out my nose and crying sand tears and trying to blink them out of my eyes and
the three boys were fleeing in terror from the five-year-old
next-door-neighbor girl who had descended on them like some relentlessly vengeful elf and snatched up their hoe and
beat them with it and bloodied the scalp of at least one of them and in a wild
flurry of ash-blonde hair chased them all away bawling like babies.
After
that she came back to the sandbox and though I don't remember how or
from where, she got some fresh water and a washcloth or a handkerchief
and helped me clean myself up so my mother wouldn't have another of her
frightfully hysterical tantrums as she would have surely had if I gone
home obviously a victim.
The
girl's name was Mary Alice Shotwell and I'm no longer sure about the
color of her eyes because when I close my own eyes and try to picture them I
sometimes see them as robins'-egg blue but usually as green as fire.
If I remember correctly she was the daughter of a U.S. Navy officer.
We
never did tell any adults what happened that day. Obviously Mary Alice
sensed I was bitterly ashamed of the entire incident – after all, I had
been defeated in what but for her intervention would have been mortal
combat – and to my recollection we never spoke of it again, though we
remained close, as near to lovers as children that age can be, until in
1946 we were permanently parted by the end of the war and her father's
assignment to some far-off naval base or ship at sea.
I have often wondered what became of her, not the least because I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.
Thank you, Mary Alice, should you ever happen to read this. You no doubt saved my life.
***
REALLY,
THOUGH, AS I noted at the beginning and have implied throughout, it is
dead wrong to blame only the South. Outside of certain genuinely
civilized parts of Manhattan – which just as the late James Baldwin
called it is indeed Another Country – xenophobia, white racism and Nazified attitudes in general are as “American” as the proverbial apple pie.
In
fact the only difference between white-supremacist Southerners and
white supremacists elsewhere in the United States is the former have
remained pridefully ignorant of the methods by which the latter
routinely conceal their venom until they can safely display it in
secret, as via the ballot. (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)
Though
the denizens of Washington state like to hide their racism,
anti-Semitism and xenophobia behind a “progressive” facade, the ugly
truth is revealed both by the so-called “Seattle Freeze” and by the state electorate's relentless march toward a Wisconsin-type Republican majority.
My
own experience of the Seattle Freeze includes two managing editors of
major Puget Sound daily newspapers who bluntly told me “(my) kind” (I
was often mistakenly assumed to be Jewish) was not welcome in the area
and that I should “do (myself) a favor and catch the next plane back to
New York City.” Seattle – where I first heard my birthplace labeled “Jew
York” and where I had the misfortune to live for nearly four years
(1972-1976) – had by far the most bigoted and deliberately exclusive
social climate I have ever encountered, infinitely worse than any place I
ever dwelt in the South.
Bellingham,
even on the Western Washington University campus, was nearly as bad as
Seattle. By contrast, Tacoma, the working-class seaport town where I
lived c. 1978-1982 and where I now have resided since 2004, is notably
friendly.
Nor
was my own family immune to the cancer of bigotry. As I would learn
after puberty, my birthmother lived with constant horror I might become
involved with a girl who was Jewish or of another race.
No doubt her paranoia was exacerbated by my father's antithetical values, one of the many reasons their marriage ended in 1945.
As
an official of the War Production Board and later of the War Assets
Administration (1945-1948), my father several times intervened to save
African-Americans who had been seized without charges by Southern cops
and shipped off to prison camps to fill vacancies on chain gangs.
After
my father became a mortgage banker in 1950, he was the one such white
man in Tennessee – more likely in the entire South – who would lend
money to creditworthy African-Americans to buy houses in previously
all-white neighborhoods.
Whenever
and to whatever degree was possible, he lived his politics. His Marxism
as much an expression of his heart as of his mind.
But
in the final years of his life, white vengeance made him pay dearly for
his earlier efforts toward integration and racial equality – another
story for another time. For now, suffice it to say that when he died in
1971, this Boston-born former upper-echelon executive and federal
official was running a gas station and automotive repair shop on the
outskirts of Knoxville.
In this context, the passage from Richard Wright's 1945 non-fiction memoir Black Boy cited in a recent Guardian report is pointedly relevant.
The white population of the United States, wrote Wright, insists
upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil,
the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened
of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way
of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look
different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of
righteousness.
The conclusion of Guardian reporters Joanne Braxton and Michael Sainato – the epicentral grafs of their analysis – is equally damning:
That
cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face its
contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a
result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits white America’s moral
and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude
of those historical and contemporary prejudices, and the effects they
have on our society.
The Charleston shooting
was not an anomaly, but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in
America towards black communities. The shooter, Roof, is a product of a
system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the
first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th
century as slaves under deplorable, inhumane conditions.
As to the breadth and depth of white racism in the United States, the history of New Orleans
is notably instructive. But the most irrefutable evidence is in
post-Katrina polls that show four-fifths of the Caucasian population refused to recognize the bigotry
manifest in the deliberate withholding of rescue and relief. This data provides an
ultimate measurement of USian racism's real-world extent.
Relevant
to these poll results is the legal concept of “countenancing”
criminality – that is, of recognizing the commission of a crime while
refusing to call the cops or otherwise act to stop or prevent it. By
application of this principle of English law, we see that those who
refuse to acknowledge racism are in fact “countenancing” it – which
reveals them to be as racist as the perpetrators of overtly racist acts.
As if to underscore the post-Katrina results, the Southern Poverty Law Center's constantly updated “Hate Map” shows that each of the 50 states is the homeland of its own coterie of white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan klaverns and Nazi bruderbands.
One of the cornerstones of their
solidarity is the U.S. doctrine of “exceptionalism” – the 21st Century
equivalent of Hitler's Master Race, a malignant combination of white
supremacy, Ayn Rand imperialism, divine-right rule and the Christian
Prosperity Gospel merged into a hoo-yah ethos of global conquest.
A notorious white supremacist is already hailing the Charleston atrocities as “a preview of coming attractions.”
Meanwhile
the self-proclaimed “Progressive Left” – our nation's sole (alleged)
defender of all the precious freedoms We the People so desperately
require if we are ever again to thrive and prosper – is demonstrating its
ideological bankruptcy by collaborating with the Ruling Class
to forcibly disarm us all, leaving us ever more defenseless against the escalating fascist threat.
LB/28 June 2015
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