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I came to an overdue realization this weekend:
I could bear all of that, I suppose. If I had to. There's NetFlix and IM and TIM and LJ and road trips. There's books and podcasts and satellite TV. But there's one thing I cannot bear about the town or its people: the casual, institutionalized racism. It's omnipresent. It's omnipotent. It's omni-malevolent.
The whites hate the blacks, the Jews, the Mexicans, and the Arabs (anyone who is dark-skinned who isn't either black or Mexican is, by default, an "AY-rab"). The blacks hate the whites, the Mexicans, the Arabs, and probably the Jews, although I doubt there are any left in Eutaw to be hated. For all I know, the Arabs, Jews and Mexicans hate the whites, blacks, and each other with equal fervor. I even hear tell that <looks around nervously, lowers voice> there's Asians in town. I doubt they've been around long enough to harbor any full-on hatreds. But it's only a matter of time. The town is sick, and the disease is racism.1 And it's contagious.
I'm sure it's the same all over. Being a white male, it's easy for me to say I never noticed it and not be lying. I was born white, male, and middle class, then sheltered from the worst aspects of life outside my limited scope. I should thank my mother for this.
When I went off to college (the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa), I had roommates (serially, not all at once) of wildly divergent backgrounds. Dwight was a good-ole country boy who went to bed at 9 pm and got up at the ass-crack of dawn. Robert was a jazz-loving, pipe-smoking big-city (NOLA) radio DJ who seemed totally bemused by me, but loved introducing me to weird stuff like Monty Python, the B-52s, George Carlin, and his own twisted sense of humor. Albert was an astounding artist who could draw anything, but who was majoring in Electrical Engineering. Jerry was an unbelievable asshole who spoke to me exactly twice in a three-week period before I begged Housing to move me to another room. Butch was in the ROTC and the military way of life flavored his every action. After that, I got a private room, but by then I was friends with a wide variety of people who broadened my horizons. Heck, I was good friends with a Puerto Rican, the student rabbi at the B'nai B'rith Hillel house, several black people, and yankees! <insert shocked, scandalized gasps of Eutaw residents here> Looking back on it, I think that by the time I was a Junior, there's no way I could have ever gone back to Eutaw for any length of time.
To show you how naïve I really was at the time, there was a boring weekend where my friends and I had absolutely nothing to do, so I offered to take them to Eutaw and show them my hometown. I had a car; they didn't. Three of them took me up on the offer. One of them was my friend Cedric, who is black. So we set off down the Interstate talking amongst ourselves. Three white boys and one black boy. When we drove into town, we drove in on the "black side" of town. I drove around a while and showed them the town, and then eventually stopped at the house of my best friend from high school, and they all met her and her parents. I think we ended up over at my mother's house for a while, and then went back to Tuscaloosa. I noticed that Cedric was very quiet, and I asked him what was up. He then told me about the looks he'd seen directed at him on the "black side" of town for being in the car with us, and said he felt extremely uncomfortable meeting my friends and family. While none of them gave him any reason to be self-conscious, he said that his hometown was very similar to Eutaw, only he grew up on the "black side" of town. I was stunned. I think that might have been the first time I realized that there is no such thing as "reverse racism"; racism is just racism, no matter who's hating whom.
That being said, Granddaddy has always used the n-word...let me pause for a moment.
I use the phrase "n-word" not because I'm afraid of the word "nigger" or want to "give it power" or whatever. I had heard it used all through my childhood and I knew it was a "bad word" that I was told never to use, even if I heard other kids or adults use it. It wasn't until I had friends at whom it was aimed with such venom and hatred that I realized just how nasty it is when spoken by people in whom hatred is practically genetic. To this day, I don't use it except in reference to the word itself, as above, or when quoting other people. So, back to the point I was about to make.
Granddaddy has always used the n-word casually. Not like you or I would use the words "table" or "Buick," but the way we might use the words "pedophile" or "leper." He means it in the worst possible way it can be meant. And if he's especially riled up, he'll precede it with "damned." As in, "That's just like a damned nigger." It always really bothered me, but it started to seriously grate on me when he directed it at friends of mine. I had my friend Rodney help me move a large couch, and Granddaddy was there because he's the one who brought it to me in his truck. Granddaddy was as nice as he could be to Rodney, and I heaved a heavy sigh that he hadn't said something really embarrassing. I'd been worrying about it for days.
Later, he was trying to remember Rodney's name, and his way of asking was, "Who was that nigger that helped you move your couch?" That may have been the first time I ever truly realized just how...disgusting the n-word can be. Yes, it's "just a word," but so is "cunt."
In every instance when I've been thrown back into socializing with Eutaw folks, I've immediately gotten uncomfortable, because it's not long at all until the racism starts flowing. Like bile. Family reunions, Thanksgiving, Christmas, funerals (yes, funerals), high school reunions...even when former high-school classmates would visit me at my first apartment in Tuscaloosa while I was a grad student. They knew I didn't drink, so they'd bring beer...and racism. It wore me down to the point that I quit socializing with them at all.
The town is > 66% black, but the government was mostly all white until just a few years back. It was a world-class scandal when Eutaw had its first black mayor and an all-black council. You'd have thought Armageddon was nigh and the four horsemen were galloping hard towards Eutaw, swords drawn.
It's probably a good thing that none of the white population have really given much thought to how unlikely it is that Jesus (and Mary, of course) was Caucasian. Wanna see a riot in the streets? Suggest to the Eutaw white churches that Jesus—if he existed at all—would have had dark skin and been Jewish. Sadly, I'm dead serious.
Eutaw has moved on in some ways, though. The all-white school is now a religious school, so they take anyone of any race...as long as they're Christian. The all-white pool closed, so the only public pool is now the one on the "black side" of town. The Junior Food/7-11/Jiffy Mart/whatever on the "white side" of town is now run by one of the town's Arabs. The once all-white neighborhoods on the "white side" of town now reflect the 70/30 race distribution, and at least some residents (even Granddaddy) realize that a good neighbor is not defined by the color of their skin, but the contents of their character (to paraphrase Dr. King).
But, as I said before, Eutaw is sick. It's so consumed by hatred that it makes me sick. And it makes me realize that while home is where the heart is, my heart is no longer at home in Eutaw.
And this makes me sad for some reason I can't put my finger on. It's like...my childhood home burned down and I lost all my mementos.
The sickness has been there for years—probably decades. But it's finally taking its toll. Crime is rampant to the point where people can't do yard-work without being armed. There was a gang fight in the public high school the other day and two high school students were sent to the hospital with razor wounds. A few days before that, two girls got into a fight in the cafeteria and one stabbed the other with a steak knife. There are drug raids, dog fighting, illegal hunting, car thefts, murders....
Eutaw is a town of around 1900 people. The median age is around 43. Young people leave the town as soon as they are able, and they don't come back. The ones that stay face a life of poverty (the median household income is around $23,000/year), and at least some of them turn to crime as a way out.
Unfortunately, I don't think Eutaw can be healed. The sickness is a cancer, and it's metastasized into every organ. The only thing left to do, now, is make the patient comfortable while waiting for the inevitable.
I may be from Eutaw—it is my hometown, and I have many fond memories of it—but I am not of Eutaw. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can't go home again.There are many reasons why I would never consider moving back to Eutaw unless some drastic life-altering event required it. Among them are the isolation, the lack of intellectual stimulation, the fact that the streets roll up at 6 pm, the total lack of any computer-related jobs in the area, and the complete absence of any of my friends. To do anything remotely entertaining requires a drive of at least 35 minutes to one of several neighboring cities with more to offer: Tuscaloosa/Northport, Demopolis, or Meridian, Mississippi. To some of the smaller communities around Eutaw, Moundville and Greensboro would probably also fit the bill. (Greensboro has a Mexican restaurant! Owned and run by real Mexicans!). The nearest decent airport is a good two hours' drive away. As for me, I found myself having to go to Birmingham, sometimes, because even Tuscaloosa didn't cut it. I guess it's only natural that I ended up in the largest city in the southeast.
I could bear all of that, I suppose. If I had to. There's NetFlix and IM and TIM and LJ and road trips. There's books and podcasts and satellite TV. But there's one thing I cannot bear about the town or its people: the casual, institutionalized racism. It's omnipresent. It's omnipotent. It's omni-malevolent.
The whites hate the blacks, the Jews, the Mexicans, and the Arabs (anyone who is dark-skinned who isn't either black or Mexican is, by default, an "AY-rab"). The blacks hate the whites, the Mexicans, the Arabs, and probably the Jews, although I doubt there are any left in Eutaw to be hated. For all I know, the Arabs, Jews and Mexicans hate the whites, blacks, and each other with equal fervor. I even hear tell that <looks around nervously, lowers voice> there's Asians in town. I doubt they've been around long enough to harbor any full-on hatreds. But it's only a matter of time. The town is sick, and the disease is racism.1 And it's contagious.
I'm sure it's the same all over. Being a white male, it's easy for me to say I never noticed it and not be lying. I was born white, male, and middle class, then sheltered from the worst aspects of life outside my limited scope. I should thank my mother for this.
When I went off to college (the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa), I had roommates (serially, not all at once) of wildly divergent backgrounds. Dwight was a good-ole country boy who went to bed at 9 pm and got up at the ass-crack of dawn. Robert was a jazz-loving, pipe-smoking big-city (NOLA) radio DJ who seemed totally bemused by me, but loved introducing me to weird stuff like Monty Python, the B-52s, George Carlin, and his own twisted sense of humor. Albert was an astounding artist who could draw anything, but who was majoring in Electrical Engineering. Jerry was an unbelievable asshole who spoke to me exactly twice in a three-week period before I begged Housing to move me to another room. Butch was in the ROTC and the military way of life flavored his every action. After that, I got a private room, but by then I was friends with a wide variety of people who broadened my horizons. Heck, I was good friends with a Puerto Rican, the student rabbi at the B'nai B'rith Hillel house, several black people, and yankees! <insert shocked, scandalized gasps of Eutaw residents here> Looking back on it, I think that by the time I was a Junior, there's no way I could have ever gone back to Eutaw for any length of time.
To show you how naïve I really was at the time, there was a boring weekend where my friends and I had absolutely nothing to do, so I offered to take them to Eutaw and show them my hometown. I had a car; they didn't. Three of them took me up on the offer. One of them was my friend Cedric, who is black. So we set off down the Interstate talking amongst ourselves. Three white boys and one black boy. When we drove into town, we drove in on the "black side" of town. I drove around a while and showed them the town, and then eventually stopped at the house of my best friend from high school, and they all met her and her parents. I think we ended up over at my mother's house for a while, and then went back to Tuscaloosa. I noticed that Cedric was very quiet, and I asked him what was up. He then told me about the looks he'd seen directed at him on the "black side" of town for being in the car with us, and said he felt extremely uncomfortable meeting my friends and family. While none of them gave him any reason to be self-conscious, he said that his hometown was very similar to Eutaw, only he grew up on the "black side" of town. I was stunned. I think that might have been the first time I realized that there is no such thing as "reverse racism"; racism is just racism, no matter who's hating whom.
That being said, Granddaddy has always used the n-word...let me pause for a moment.
I use the phrase "n-word" not because I'm afraid of the word "nigger" or want to "give it power" or whatever. I had heard it used all through my childhood and I knew it was a "bad word" that I was told never to use, even if I heard other kids or adults use it. It wasn't until I had friends at whom it was aimed with such venom and hatred that I realized just how nasty it is when spoken by people in whom hatred is practically genetic. To this day, I don't use it except in reference to the word itself, as above, or when quoting other people. So, back to the point I was about to make.
Granddaddy has always used the n-word casually. Not like you or I would use the words "table" or "Buick," but the way we might use the words "pedophile" or "leper." He means it in the worst possible way it can be meant. And if he's especially riled up, he'll precede it with "damned." As in, "That's just like a damned nigger." It always really bothered me, but it started to seriously grate on me when he directed it at friends of mine. I had my friend Rodney help me move a large couch, and Granddaddy was there because he's the one who brought it to me in his truck. Granddaddy was as nice as he could be to Rodney, and I heaved a heavy sigh that he hadn't said something really embarrassing. I'd been worrying about it for days.
Later, he was trying to remember Rodney's name, and his way of asking was, "Who was that nigger that helped you move your couch?" That may have been the first time I ever truly realized just how...disgusting the n-word can be. Yes, it's "just a word," but so is "cunt."
In every instance when I've been thrown back into socializing with Eutaw folks, I've immediately gotten uncomfortable, because it's not long at all until the racism starts flowing. Like bile. Family reunions, Thanksgiving, Christmas, funerals (yes, funerals), high school reunions...even when former high-school classmates would visit me at my first apartment in Tuscaloosa while I was a grad student. They knew I didn't drink, so they'd bring beer...and racism. It wore me down to the point that I quit socializing with them at all.
The town is > 66% black, but the government was mostly all white until just a few years back. It was a world-class scandal when Eutaw had its first black mayor and an all-black council. You'd have thought Armageddon was nigh and the four horsemen were galloping hard towards Eutaw, swords drawn.
It's probably a good thing that none of the white population have really given much thought to how unlikely it is that Jesus (and Mary, of course) was Caucasian. Wanna see a riot in the streets? Suggest to the Eutaw white churches that Jesus—if he existed at all—would have had dark skin and been Jewish. Sadly, I'm dead serious.
Eutaw has moved on in some ways, though. The all-white school is now a religious school, so they take anyone of any race...as long as they're Christian. The all-white pool closed, so the only public pool is now the one on the "black side" of town. The Junior Food/7-11/Jiffy Mart/whatever on the "white side" of town is now run by one of the town's Arabs. The once all-white neighborhoods on the "white side" of town now reflect the 70/30 race distribution, and at least some residents (even Granddaddy) realize that a good neighbor is not defined by the color of their skin, but the contents of their character (to paraphrase Dr. King).
But, as I said before, Eutaw is sick. It's so consumed by hatred that it makes me sick. And it makes me realize that while home is where the heart is, my heart is no longer at home in Eutaw.
And this makes me sad for some reason I can't put my finger on. It's like...my childhood home burned down and I lost all my mementos.
The sickness has been there for years—probably decades. But it's finally taking its toll. Crime is rampant to the point where people can't do yard-work without being armed. There was a gang fight in the public high school the other day and two high school students were sent to the hospital with razor wounds. A few days before that, two girls got into a fight in the cafeteria and one stabbed the other with a steak knife. There are drug raids, dog fighting, illegal hunting, car thefts, murders....
Eutaw is a town of around 1900 people. The median age is around 43. Young people leave the town as soon as they are able, and they don't come back. The ones that stay face a life of poverty (the median household income is around $23,000/year), and at least some of them turn to crime as a way out.
Unfortunately, I don't think Eutaw can be healed. The sickness is a cancer, and it's metastasized into every organ. The only thing left to do, now, is make the patient comfortable while waiting for the inevitable.
- Lest you get the impression that all the hatred is "simply" racial, the Arab guy (we think he's from Yemen) who owns/runs the 7-11 tried to buy a house for himself and his family, whom he's trying to bring over from their home country. He really liked one house and tried to put an offer down and was told that the owner didn't want to sell it to him because it needed to be sold to a Christian. Yep. Welcome to Eutaw, Ahmed (his actual name, not a slur). Now leave.
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But I'm not really convinced that other places are less racist. I think that people in other places are just not willing to be so open about it, except perhaps when they disguise it as being about immigration or terrorism.
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This is probably true. I've spent a good bit of time over the last few years in rural New York, and it was remarkable to me how similar it is to rural Georgia or Alabama, in so many ways.
This isn't to pick on your particular corner of the country - I'm sure it's the same pretty much anywhere.
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And that's sad. Some of my best friends are of vastly different opinions than I am. We have actual discussions instead of endlessly agreeing with one another.
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While the racism/discrimination is different in NY, it's still there. There might actually be a bit less of it, but I think that's entirely due to self preservation. People who live closely packed together with other people of every racial type just can't afford to be as racist. At least, not openly and they'd better hide it pretty well.
I think the SF Bay Area might be the least racist place I've ever lived. Yes, it's still there, but the majority of people let it be known quite openly that it's frowned upon (to say the least). The thing is, once you get away from the urban area around the bay, you've gone back in time 40 or 50 years and all of the prejudice and stupidity comes out to play.
When I first moved to California in the mid-80's, I remember watching TV with one of my roommates. It was CNN and they were reporting about a cross burning (complete with KKK members wearing sheets) somewhere in Idaho. He was absolutely livid about this and the only thing he could manage to say was "those assholes are protesting you!". Never having been the target of discrimination, I was more curious than anything else. My first thought was 'How can this possibly help them get what they want?' followed quickly by 'Why would they burn a cross in a place where there are just about none of the people they're angry at/about?'. Obviously I don't understand.
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It's funny you should say this. When friends would ask me about my hometown, I'd tell them that if you drove South on I-59 from Tuscaloosa, you'd eventually come to a shimmering curtain of light.
They'd appropriately say, "What?" and give me The Look™. To which I'd respond, "It's the time portal back to 1872. People here have only just gotten the news that the Civil War is over and the slaves are freed."
It was a stupid trick, but it did get the point across.
I hope that, one day soon, someone drags Eutaw kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
'How can this possibly help them get what they want?'
Such a wonderful question. And one that should be shouted from the rooftops when they're doing it. I've never witnessed one in Eutaw, but my understanding is that the KKK is alive and well, there.
As are, I'm sure, anti-white organizations. Let's be fair and balanced, after all. :)
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Discrimination is discrimination. It doesn't matter which group hates the other, it's still the same thing, and just as ugly.
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A lot of people don't get it when I say "there's no such thing as 'reverse racism.'" They respond, "Sure there is! It's when black people hate white people!" To which I respond, "That's just 'racism.' It's not 'reverse.'"
To which they usually respond, "Sure it is! Because it's black people hating white people." Then they talk to me like I'm mentally impaired.
*sigh*
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