Crossposted from Town Called Dobson & My Left Wing
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Now, hopefully, MSNBC will have something substantial on in the morning. Imus has always been a problem, but the outcry was never high enough.
What, I think, most whites in America fail to understand is that most blacks think Imus’ behavior and language is the rule, not the exception and every time some White man gets in front of a microphone and shouts “Halfrican American” and nothing happens to the White man, most Blacks just nod and say “What did you expect? He’s White, they all think like that.”
Not all Whites think like that – a majority don’t but many do. As a White man in the American South, I hear it all the time. If I am in a little store and black person leaves, 20% of the time I will hear “nigger” slosh out of the mouth of some White guy. Then I open my mouth… They are shocked, SHOCKED that a White guy would stick up for a Black stranger. Then they usually apologize (unless I am in Klan infested Montgomery County).
Things are getting better. I man I work with, Ken, is an old hippie. He was telling me of how the 60’s revolution was for him and how he sees the same bullshit in Iraq today that he saw in Vietnam more than 40 years ago. For him, the 60’s was about casting off the insane pressure of social conformity. When he graduated from high school in 1961, the dam burst… the social revolt began. Ken, a White hippie, loved hanging out with Blacks in his town to jam – he is also a gifted guitarist and he got hassled for going to the “colored” side of town to mingle with the Blacks. He fought for the right for Blacks to vote, he cried when MLK was shot. He still cries, as we all do, at the Vietnam Memorial.
I graduated from high school, in Dobson, NC in 1981 – exactly 20 years after Ken did. I told him, the things his generation fought for, especially civil rights, helped and had an impact that is visible today. Because in that 20 year period, somehow, in the South, in Dobson of all places, dating outside of your race was the IN thing to do.
Imus, Savage, Limbaugh, they are all just fucking dinosaurs that society will one day gaze upon in a museum and tell our grandchildren that these are the last corpses of American racism.