RACISM RUNS EVERY WHICH WAY



      malcolm x



Heard somebody say on the radio awhile ago something about racism, Tavis Smiley and maybe it was Cornel West, would be talking on the subject, how race is impacted in our lives. I didn't hear what they had to say. I'd just heard a half hour radio documentary on Forest Carter, who wrote The Education of Little Tree. Turns out Forest Carter is Asa Carter a klansman, this, that and the other. The book is so popular as a really good read that when the word came out that Forest Carter was actually Asa Carter, nobody cared. A good story is a good story. In this case, it's a superb story. It's a particularly American story. The movie is superb too, only it doesn't have the golden glow about it the book has. It's not because it's a book, but because it was written from the heart and a good story told. Evidently, there is an issue of Asa Carter being Forest Carter, but nobody cares. It has never made any difference to me that the writer of the story wrote from an alter-ego. Too much expectation of the rational in human behavior. It's still among the most wonderful stories I've read. George Sand, the English writer, was a woman her readers believed to be a man. Hot dang.


There is too much emphasis on racism projected onto the South, too much blame heaped on the South for something that ended a century and a half ago. Before that, it wasn't just the South. Slavery was sanctioned by the Bible just like war is. The Bible sez: slavery good. The Bible sez: war good. The Bible sez: kill em all. One of the things I love most about the South is the rest of the country looks down on it. Like in school I found the kids that the cool kids stayed away from, rejected, were the most interesting ones. Like most of my life I've wondered if I might run across a wise man along my way. I didn't need to go to a cave in a Himalayan mountain to find one. I found a wise man in Whitehead NC, a farmer, sawmiller, welder, tractor mechanic, bluegrass banjo picker, quit school after 11th grade. He had no more money or assets than I have, which is the minimum it takes to keep an autonomous existence. The wise man I found lived in poverty in a mountain county with no interest in anything happening outside Whitehead and Pine Swamp. Whitehead is where he was born, lived his life and was buried. Pine Swamp is where his mother's relatives lived. I found a wise man in America in the South. I know he is not the only one and I know wisdom is not solely a Southern phenomenon. This just happens to be the one God chose to lead me to, for the opportunity to serve a Master in his frailty and learn from him.


When I heard the sentence earlier about race impacting our lives, not having time to hear the show, it pushed me into looking in myself at how race has impacted my life. For one thing, in America, the Western world, Christendom, whiteness is a privilege to be born with, like wealth. That's the nature of the world I've always lived in. Not many white people get it, but all black people get it. Race has impacted my life by being a white man with compassion for what my race puts people of other races through. I can't change the apartheid system in America. I went to civil rights marches and rallies until I saw it was not my place. I withdrew even interest, it was not my problem any more, and went to college in a white world in the South. There were plenty of black issues, but white people don't care; the black people can demand and carry on all they want. White people switch the channel if it gets too loud. It seems to me one of the great issues black people have is that white people don't see them unless they sing, dance, talk dirty and play sports.


Race impacts my world mostly by denial. Almost everybody I know is a racist, including myself, and black people are racists too, so we always have awkward encounters. When I say we're racists, I don't mean a flaming cross kind of racist. I mean I've looked within and found it to be so that I have had it preached into me since childhood. The quiet message from my parents was niggers are ok, best left alone. This was the 1940s and 50s. There was the attitude that they were the same as gypsies, would rob you in the blink of an eye. Of course, the black people lived in a culture of poverty where survival was a way of life. The black kids I knew in childhood were poor, really poor, beat down by the drunk with serious self-esteem issues that lived with their mama in a shack of a house with half a dozen brothers and sisters. Among white people it was taken for granted that's how niggers lived. I felt the compassion early in childhood, pre school, knowing Dorothy Hopkins and her mother, who lived down the hill behind where I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, Argentine, close to the football stadium on Lawrence dr. 2312. The house is gone and a newer house is in its place. Black people live there now. I never understood why I wasn't supposed to like black people when the kids I knew were good people. They were afraid of white people and I felt sorry for them having to be afraid of me because I'm white. I didn't want to hurt them in any way. I didn't want to trade places with them either.


Then 1954 came and I went into the 7th grade, new and bigger school. It was the first year the black kids that went to Sumner High by bus from small neighborhoods all over the city had to go to school with the white kids at the school nearest their neighborhood. They were scared. Immediately, they clustered into gangs and became a threat because they were threatened. Iran wants nukes, because they know the American military force leaves colored countries alone that have nukes. Pakistan and N Korea are the privileged ones in the "developing world," no apprehension about the paper tiger attacking them. The black boys gathered into gangs for the very same reason, to protect themselves from the white boys. A black kid in a gang was safe. Not in a gang, he risked harassment from white guys, jocks, relentlessly, like Mexicans now in Sparta. I'm hearing on the radio news for the first time that somebody has actually said it out in the open that half the American population lives in poverty. I've often wondered why I saw that and nobody else did. The media never touch it. Government is all about looking good, not pissing on corpses in the Army, and SS not making an international scandal in Columbia over short-changing whores. Makes us look bad. Abu Graib did too, but that was ok. All of it was ok, just don't take pictures of it and put them on the internet. The way I see it, they needed punishment for stupid. Pissing on a corpse for a YouTube moment I can only see as stupid. It's stupid to do without making a video. Totally stupid to advertise it on the internet. Stupid is as stupid does. It's a natural law, like shit happens.


The race issue has always been a difficult one for me. After 1954 the anger that had been boiling in the black people came to the surface. Before, it was easy to talk with black people. They were always nice and agreeable, what I now know they called "shuckin and jivin." Or something like that. Tap dancing. Many white people and many black people attempted integration, but such social changes don't happen as fast as we want them to. I don't make any effort to be extra nice to black people I know. I feel like the best way I can show a black person respect is to treat him and her as I do white people. No special treatment, and no less respect. I believe that's the goal of the civil rights movement. It's not about whether I feel any racism within or if black people feel racism. We Americans grew up in a racist culture, rallying to our own race, and I don't mean this in absolutes. I'm calling 5% racism the same as 100%. A trace is still racism. I like to think I have never used the privilege of race to my own benefit. I want the black people to have exactly the same privileges white people have. We'll have racism as long as we have ego. Ego is not in any hurry to go away and racism is right there with it. I can't solve all the issues, but I can consciously approach racial issues with do no harm, as in other issues. 


* 

MIND WARS

lonesome old yeller

It's a new day, a new time. I didn't step outside my life to be an assist to Jr, it being a major part of my life to ease his decline. It's more like I'm back at my home, still in my life. I noticed when I found Jr not breathing and sat beside him, my hand on the back of his hand, crying, praying, that I have a new way of seeing death I'd never seen before, which is that death is nothing. Nothing at all. Of course, we grieve for ourselves the loss of a friend. It feels inside like I've already grieved. This may be off the beam, but it's how I feel. I can't miss him, because I saw him arrive at his own completion and fade to nothing left but a skin-draped skeleton. I wouldn't want him back, because I know how much his body hurt him all the time. I could not ask his soul to return to that body. Perhaps it's easier to let go of a friend when I experienced the decline unto the last breath.

I see in my mind sometimes the battles I went through to keep him at home and let him fade into eternal sleep. I've forgotten most of them by now, they've become so meaningless. Services agencies I had to run off, one at a time. They come in, help out, then start giving orders, then threatening, and that's when it's don't let the door hit you in the ass. The nursing homes were the most horrid experience of Jr's life and mine. He lived for 2 months and 1 week in the care of their indifference and their refusal to let him out. That's when TJ says, Don't make Taurus the bull tear down his pen getting out. The bull came out of there and they don't ever want to hear my name again in the Independence facility.

I had a ruthless sense about me at the time. I was ready to go as far as they wanted to go in the battle. It's said, when you're not afraid of dying, you're not afraid of anything. When Jr Maxwell's life was at stake, I was ready for anything. Nothing would be too far. The agencies and SS hardened my attitude toward everything called Service. Turns out it's service like bulls serving cows. They tried to serve a bull and the bull didn't like it. I kept reminding myself that nothing worthwhile gets done without resistance. My fighting strategy with them was hunt the snakes. Like how do you get from one end of a field full of deadly snakes to the other? Hunt the snakes. It's a principle of turning the chase on the pursuer. Like if you're chased by a dog, turn around and run at the dog and the dog will turn around and run away. It works with humans too.

I'm not running for election, and hate only hurts the hater, so I was free. The more they hated me, the more they hurt themselves. When they upped the ante on me, they went off into the ridiculous and DrK signed to set Jr free, defying their will. I'm forever grateful to DrK helping get Jr out of that prison. Several times he'd say, 'Wha'd I do to get in here? I'm not a criminal. I didn't break the law.' Which fueled the fire under my ass to get him out of there. The problem was that I had spent 2 months going in there daily, got acquainted with the staff, saw and learned things that outsiders aren't supposed to know. When the war started, I knew more about them than they knew about me. They paid me no mind because the money wasn't coming out of my pocket. They didn't know that when I have promised my friend I'm on his side, it doesn't mean anything but whatever it takes to help Jr be comfortable at home. If they wanted a gun fight, well I've got one too, and mine would splatter their guts from here to kingdom come.

I don't recall if I mentioned it before, when we were creeping down the hallway of the Sparta nursing home on the way to the door, Jr hobbling along with his walker, me carrying the 2 plastic grocery store bags stuffed with his things, when we made the turn into the hallway with the door at the end and the desk half way between, an image flashed in my mind, a half second fantasy thought: I am Steven Seagal. I'm shooting forward, advancing toward the door, the office staff shooting back and flopping down dead all around. Jr is behind me covering us from the rear, shooting at the ones advancing from behind. I say to Jr, 'If you want out of here, stay with me!'

That crazy moment of a half second dream made me laugh inside, such that by the time we made it to the desk, where we checked out peaceably,

I was in a good mood thinking how funny that thought was. Punching the buttons to open the door, I felt all the better when the glass doors parted and we passed through to freedom. Free at last, free at last. Driving down the sharp curve driveway, I said, 'You will never go back there as long as I'm living.' I wasn't blowing smoke, and Jr knew it. I never forgot those words because they came from the core of my meaning. Only a prediction in that it was how things stood already.

I didn't really go at it conventional war style. I'd let them make a move, then I'd make a move that cancelled it. They make another move, my move cancels it. I stood nose to nose with them all the way. When they became so determined they defied decency, they'd gone too far and had to be reined back. I walked Jr out of there and delivered him at home. Stepping through the doorway at home, he said, 'Lord God! Thank you!' This was one of the many moments that rewarded my efforts, the joy he felt passing through the doorway he was afraid for 2 months he'd never see again.

It has been fun today reviewing the back and forth mind games; you pissed me off, so I'm going to piss you off. Escalating versions that start there got pretty hot in a little bit of time; like when it started, it was On. The only thing I had to be afraid of was they'd arrange it so he could never get out, which they were working on. That aint gonna happen when the bull is already out of his pen, and this is a bull you have to shoot to stop. There came a time the $200 a day they were getting from Jr against his will wasn't worth it. I wheeled him out the door in the wheelchair and we had a nice drive from Independence to Whitehead.