Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [44]
The Good Ol’ Days
It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, white supremacists wore white, black people were colored, yellow buses were segregated, and coloreds who assaulted whites met swift justice. Bigots wore hostility across their chests like the emblem of a team uniform. They preached about God’s “line of distinction” in their churches and enforced it in their schools, on their buses, and at their lunch counters, not to mention on their toilet seats. When civil rights activists and the National Guard finally came to erase the lines of distinction that fissured across the American countryside, the bigots responded with venom and violence.
But slowly, year by year, the nation matured. The lines of distinction began to wash away, and racial intolerance became a shameful offense. It’s not easy to be a racist in the twenty-first century. In 2009, a Louisiana justice of the peace who refused to grant marriage licenses to interracial couples insisted, “I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way.”ap He explained his nonracism in detail: “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom.”7 (In that order?)
Even white supremacists feel obliged to mask their white supremacism. David Duke, former Klan leader and founder of the NAAWP (National Association for the Advancement of White People), energetically condemns “any effort of any race to be supreme over or control other races,” which is quite open-minded of him, though it isn’t what most people mean by “white supremacy.” Duke also insists that he is not “anti-black” but rather “pro-European American,” which he believes to be a genuine distinction. Duke writes, “I love my people and I am not willing for my people to face discrimination or the ethnic cleansing, dissolution and genocide of massive immigration.”8 (While white genocide has not historically been a significant problem in the United States, one can never be too cautious with all these brownish-hued supremacists coming over our borders.)
Anxious racists aside, the nation has progressed far in a relatively short period of time. Reading old news articles from the 1960s and 1970s, the transformation in the way Americans treat racial distinctions is striking. For instance, a 1961 Time magazine article titled “Nigger, Go Home” described a mob of several hundred white people howling curses at “Negroes” who had been offered temporary refuge by a church in a white Chicago neighborhood after their residential hotel burned down.
Down in the basement, the Negroes could hear every bitter shout: “Nigger, nigger, go home,” and “Nigger lovers never go to heaven,” and “We’ll rock you out,” and “Get the niggers out of there.”
Fearing damage to his church, the pastor expelled the refugees. Racists pelted them with oranges, apples, and eggs as they walked to Red Cross station wagons that took them to black churches several miles away.9
Six weeks after the incident, Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. His birth certificate lists his mother’s race, “Caucasian,” and his father’s race, “African.”aq Forty-eight and a half years later, President-elect Barack Hussein Obama II and his family moved into the most exclusive address in the nation. The Secret Service protects them from any would-be egg throwers. Time magazine’s editors wouldn’t think of publishing “the N-word” on Time’s inoffensive pages, and the mob scene from 1961