New York Times Op-Ed: racism is alive and well

[live love laugh]

A Cold Current
By JESMYN WARD


As a child of the ’80s, my realization of what it meant to be black in Mississippi was nothing like my grandmother’s in the ’30s. For her it was deadly; it meant that her grandfather was shot to death in the woods near his house, by a gang of white patrollers looking for illegal liquor stills. None of the men who killed her grandfather were ever held accountable for the crime. Being black in Mississippi meant that, when she and her siblings drove through a Klan area, they had to hide in the back of the car, blankets thrown over them to cover their dark skin, their dark hair, while their father, who looked white, drove.

<snip>

I first learned what racism was on a long yellow school bus, when I was 6. We were riding far up in the country, in the same neighborhoods where my grandmother hid under blankets to hide her face, picking up white kids whose shirts always seemed too thin and their pants too short. That day on the bus, some of the children began telling me a story about their friends who rode other buses. Evidently, these friends had done something wrong. These friends, the children told me, told one another nigger jokes and sang short songs that all of us knew about “picking niggers.” As the children told me this, they looked at me as if I’d grown horns or turned green, and it was then that I realized that I was a nigger, and that those other kids were telling jokes about me, and singing songs about me. I said quietly, “That’s not right.” One of the children said: “We don’t say that word. They do.” I couldn’t articulate it, but I felt menace. I felt an undercurrent of violence like the cold touch of deep water in a lake.

I felt it again in seventh grade. I was walking up the bleachers toward a group of girls who were in my class. They sat in a cluster, watching the boys playing dodge ball in the dim gym. It was hot. I said hello to them and sat down on a row of bleachers a bit higher than they were so I would have a good view of the game, when Eleanor, a girl with a wide, flat face and brown hair frosted blond and dry, turned to me and flipped her hair over her shoulder and said, “Why don’t you put nigger braids in my hair?” “What did you say?” I asked. “You know,” she said. “Nigger braids.” And then she flushed and smiled with pleasure. It was the first time I would see that expression, but it was not the last; I would see it on the face of every person who said such things to me afterward in junior high and high school: red face, too many teeth.

<snip>

But it wasn’t until I was older that I understood that the undercurrent of violence I’d felt was actually more than a deep, cold current — that it in fact exerted a strong undertow in the present. That it could take my great-great-grandfather, but also take young men like Oscar Grant III, shot to death by a transit officer in Oakland in 2009; like Trayvon Martin; like my only brother, killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver who was charged with leaving the scene of an accident but never with the crime of my brother’s death. That it could assert they were less in life and deny them justice after death as well. That living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one life was worth less than another. Again and again. Then and now.

<snip>

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/a-cold-current/?_r=0

[Just Saying]

1. Powerful

This piece is an example of why you can't describe racism to some people. They can't understand why the comments and jokes are hurtful, wrong and yes, hold that undercurrent of violence.

Even when they know a black kid had the police called on him and was followed just for walking down the street and then shot and killed, they refuse to admit that racism was the reason. I feel that cold undercurrent whenever I see people defending Zimmerman.

[live love laugh]

2. Yes this is very powerful and disheartening b/c it seems to be more prevalent. nt

[Mojorabbit]

3. Powerful piece nt

[Yo_Mama]

4. It may still be alive, but is not and never was "well". n/t

[live love laugh]

5. Florida Man shoots black man calls cops says he only shot "A N-word"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/walton-henry-buttler-shooting-hate-crime_n_1730256.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

[riderinthestorm]

6. Wow. Important read. Big K&R. Thanks for posting. nt