“… for the vandalizer and all white people everywhere.”
Please, understand that I feel your article is as justified as any I’ve read of late, seriously, and the injustice you describe angered me (as it should everyone.) I say this as someone who very distinctly remembers the first racist act I saw; in the segregated south, about 1961. And I also remember just as clearly how I felt at school the day after Dr. King was murdered, when I saw classmates “playing” sniper and victim in the classroom.
There has scarcely been a day of my adult life when I haven’t given what I had to give in support of universal justice and equality. As such, it pleased me not even a little to have a Medium writer I respected (and I thought respected me) write that “liberals can’t be trusted”, as if the only cause I have any right to fight for is that of old white southern men. (I still wonder how she would have shared that particular viewpoint with Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwermer.) Personally, I’d prefer to be considered a “human being” first and foremost before those other four less important qualifications, but others apparently “see” me differently.
Please, I realize, as a southerner (perhaps better than most) how serious the problem is, if only as an active observer. Three times in my life I’d have very likely been dead at the hands of cops if not for my skin. I know too well how 7,000 people were murdered with ropes around their necks, emasculated (and worse), skin burning off. (And a fair percentage of those, almost 1,300, were white, many of them murdered for being “negro-lovers”. It’s hard to miss the irony of being so disregarded, while so many supportive whites were generally punished worse, being considered “race traitors”.) But the fact that I’m white should not necessarily make me feel as though nothing I do, no money I donate, no amount of time I invest will ever matter. (The reason I use my gamer ID is because of the threats I received after years of having every letter to the editor on progressive matters accepted. Right up until the phone company “outed” my physical address, and the threats began that very day. I don’t dare let my real name become public. Not in rural South Carolina.)
I suspect that if you lived with me for a year you’d be amazed how many people there are here that have done, and continue to do everything within their power to attempt to make a difference, and how many of them are white. I know of older women assaulted and intimidated for the unforgivable act of campaigning for Obama. Granted, in the south we are in the minority, and I’ll not deny it. But we do it because it’s right, and we will continue to do so with or without the appreciation we’ve never expected. All we do expect, from ourselves and each other, is to each of us do our best to keep the dream of justice alive within us, a dream that none of us will ever hope to see fulfilled in our lives (especially those of us old enough to remember segregation.).
Still, it would just be nice if the assumption so often made that we are so rare as to essentially not exist was at least a bit less common.
Respectfully…
(Going to this woman’s defense is a noble and selfless act. There should be far more of it, and perhaps with writers such as yourself as examples there will be.)
