Editors note: This morning my hometown rag, the Charlotte Observer, featured a front page piece on a town hall style meeting held with US Representative Sue Myrick and local area Muslims to help build bridges over incendiary comments she made offending Muslims. Myrick has not been shy in advocating strict immigration reform and as a Member of the House Intelligence Committee has made sweeping remarks that many interpreted as linking all Muslims to terrorism.
Not exactly the welcome mat for those choosing to practice freedom of religion in the U.S. of A.
Earlier this week I wrote a review/oped piece for Like The Dew where I looked at Timothy B. Tyson’s book, turned movie, Blood Done Sign My Name. The story chronicles Tyson, a historian and professor of Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke University, and his experience as a child growing up in rural NC. There he was witness to a turning point in the racially charged southern small town of Oxford. Like many such southern communities in the period immediately following the civil rights movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, Oxford residents were grappling with what the future of race would look like in their hometown.
Race and religion as a proxy for race have been an issue in America (and beyond) since our founding and is not going away anytime soon. What we need is MORE dialogue, more in your face confrontation of hate and ignorance and more understanding. Here is Rob Crisman’s take. Listen up.
STEREOTYPES
by Robert Crisman
Black and white are two camps in this country, divided, at war. The early white boss-man, for all the raping he did in the slave shacks, decreed: black and white segregation and enmity forever. He figured, keep the black and white peons apart, and throw the white boy some peanuts and tell him he’s better than black, and the boss-man could keep right on raping from one end of town to the other.
Divide and conquer! It worked like a charm. The white boy strutted like he was the boss-man, the standard by which things are measured. The bossman patted his head and said, “Good boy,” and tossed him more chump change.
Myth has it today that the walls have come down—after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching and riots and marches and myriad movements for change. The color line’s dead! We all love each other! That’s the line now.
Of course, the ghettos and all their uncounted millions… But talk about that on the Six O’clock News and you spoil the white folks’ dinner and stuff. Some black folks’ too. So, spin propaganda: “It’s all getting better.”
White folks, meanwhile, are scrambling to get to the exurbs and enclaves, or up into condos so high, with armed guards at the door, that mean streets can’t touch them. Then, out of sight, out of mind…
Aside from TV and the movies and ads, it’s a huge racial divide.
Of course, some things have changed, enough that the question is raised, just what does it mean to be black in this day and age? What is black? What, for that matter, is white? Black folks are doctors and lawyers, dancers and golfers, and aides to George Bush—and now the president, Barack Obama. Meanwhile, the white folks are stockbrokers, junkies, and Maytag repairmen, like always.
All duly noted, and yet—be black and get stopped by the cops in L.A. or Detroit or wherever. Be white and go walking in “bad” parts of town.
And those black and white stereotypes, man! Straight out of Time-Warner, re-cooked from past poisons, each taken for truth on both sides of the line.
Brothers are bone thugs, they have these big dicks, and they want your mama, your grandma, your sister, your daughter—or you, for that matter.
Gorillas and thieves, yes indeed…
The white boys mostly are sissy-ass Dagwoods and short-dicks whose daddies have money and they can’t do shit. Also, fake Rambos who want to be bad like the brothers.
Poor whites? Trailer trash, brother. Arkansas peckerwoods fucking their 10-year-old sisters in pig-sties…
One thing to note: Dagwoods get funneled toward corporate anthills—mostly as lackeys with some sort of title—and not to the prisons and graveyards that so many brothers learn to call home.
A critical difference for sure. Yet all these black and white jackets eat just like acid. They kill our humanity deader than dogs. They function as murder by brushstroke, nightmare cartoons. And to the degree that we’ve bought them—and that’s to quite a degree—they’ve turned us into a nation of pi-dogs and monsters—image made flesh, n’est ce pas?—our hearts full of murder, afraid of our own fucking shadows.
Divide and conquer, no shit.
