"I want to tell you that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches." Spoken by Strom Thurmond in a speech to the 1948 States Rights convention.
Hmmm, another racist dead and on his way to that big daisy chain in hell. People will say that Strom turned his life around and died a different man then what he was in his youth, I don’t really give a fuck, he was what he was. People sometime ask me why do I hang around with people full of tattoos and piercings. It’s because people like that don’t really give a fuck what color the cat on the next barstool is. Racism is an ugly ugly thing and I’ve had to deal with it all my life; from being denied joining the Cub Scouts in my white neighborhood as a kid to visiting my parents family in west Texas and not figuring out till I was a lot older why we had to go thru the back door of the restaurant my aunt worked in. Why as a kid when we heard the word nigger directed at us all we could do was stare, cause if we dared fight it’ll be more trouble then it was worth. It was as a kid learning why my grandparents hated the white man so much. And why when he came around the other face was turned. It was going through school reading all the history books and wondering why the stories sounded so different then from the way I was taught at home. It was watching cartoons and laughing at the “colored” characters and the way they were drawn till I learned why I shouldn’t. Watching the Black Panther’s on the TV and seeing em walk around my school and digging the vibe they put out, till my father had to go bust some of em, and telling me the way shit was. Its being told that I’m not “down” and not black enough because my parents beat it into me that learning was a gift, and that I learned to love reading and prided myself on speaking well. I learned to hate the word “Nigger” with a passion I have for few things, and still can’t understand why other black folk insist on calling each other by that name as if it was something special. Fuck, just handfuls of years ago folks were dying over the use of that word. It’s me feeling so sad and lost because the times have desensitized that word so much that white kids are not only greeting each other by that name but their black friends as well. Racism never really goes away, it always shows up when you least expect it. Hell maybe having kids use the word nigger in their everyday conversations is a way to desensitize it. Maybe that’s the way to rid us of racism, I don’t know, I don’t have the answers. I just know another racist is dead and gone to hell. And that’s a good thing. Peace