Remember that Joe-in-Blackface flap a couple of weeks ago?  Yeah, me neither, but if you go over to the Stupidity-Based Community, they’re talking about it like it happened yesterday.  I don’t know whether to bless Technorati or curse it, sometimes, because it’s like a magic mirror into some really bad, bad people’s minds.  It seems the Cretinous Classes of the Right have latched on to that as proof positive that Jane (and by extension all of us here at FDL) are the same kind of Kloset Klansmen that they are.

Well, tonight I’m gonna get a little autobiographical on y’all and see if I can’t explain to you a little bit about why bringing the fight to the Reich Wing for me is a personal crusade, a fight that I will never abandon, and that liberty for all people is something I feel is worth fighting to the death for.  Oh, and by the way.  Remember, "Liberty" is our word.  Sharing, as it does, the same root word as "Liberal".  To a Right Winger, "Liberty" means the freedom to drive a Hummer in a petroleum-starved world, the freedom to declare themselves superior to all other races on the planet, shove all their messes and mistakes off on poor people, and invade other people’s countries, willy-nilly, on a bunch of cooked intelligence and a half-witted president’s whim, and declare that it’s for our "safety".  And apparently it also means that said half-wit boy-king can do whatever he likes with regard to your privacy, even if that means destroying liberty in order to "save" it.

For you and me, "Liberty" means what it’s supposed to.  Freedom to lead our own lives without being spied upon illegally, for instance.  It means the right to adequate health care.  It means the freedom to go to good schools, work hard, stay out of trouble and maybe one day make something of ourselves, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconimic background.  It means the government can’t interfere with our lives, tell us when to bear children, when to marry and not marry, or otherwise try to direct our choices, for good or ill, based on someone else’s backward, superstitious, outdated ideological framework.

I was born and raised in the South.  And not the moneyed, eccentric-tolerant, literary New South.  I’m from what they call the Dirty South.  I was very lucky.  Even though we didn’t have much money, my brother and I were taught to be tolerant, respectful, kind, thoughtful, and intellectually curious (Thanks, Dad!) as well as tough, principled, ethical, and brave (Thanks, Mom!) and to never, ever, ever assume that anyone, especially ourselves, is ever inherently greater or less than any other person.  Rich or poor, black or pink or brown, Bible-thumping or cheerfully agnostic, everyone deserves to be considered on the merits of who they are, not what they are.

My mom’s first job in my home town was at the Urban League.  It was south Georgia in the early seventies and racial tensions were running high as the first waves of integration blurred ancient and heavily guarded lines of class, race, and color.  To my mother, the most urgent issue facing that city, an old mill town with a massive Army base, was ensuring justice and peace for the black community.  She was the Urban League’s single white employee.  She marched, she advocated, she spoke out in the media.  And on the weekends, everybody came to our house, where jugs of wine flowed, the stereo played Roberta Flack and Barry White deep into the night, and there was always lots of laughter, lots of hugs, singing, and gaggles of black and white kids and grown ups playing, eating, dancing, working, and loving, all together.

This did not go over well in our mostly working-class, all-white neighborhood.  My mom got drummed out of certain community groups.  Then she started getting hateful letters.  So, what did she do?

She had bigger parties.

This same "Up-yours!" attitude was what compelled her years later to create a petition drive and media campaign to stop the Klan when they wanted to patrol our neighborhood late at night after early forensic evidence in a series of strangling murders indicated that the man murdering the wealthy white victims was black.  That was the summer of 1978.  My mother was appalled that the Ku Klux Klan even dared to show themselves there, let alone announce that they would be taking justice into their own hands.

Thousands of signatures and hundreds of column-inches and camera-hours later, the Klan was forced to stand down.  They made threatening phone calls.  They sent more hate-mail.  They poisoned our cat and threw his body in the bushes.  My parents told my brother and me to never pick up, open, or kick any packages we found on the door-step.  They said never to get into a stranger’s car, even if it was the police, no matter what they said.  Unless it was someone we knew, say "no thank you" and keep walking.

I learned something important then.  Racists, right-wingers, and other bullies are all talk.  They threaten.  They argue.  They promise to unleash all manner of hell upon you if you don’t back down, but in the end, they hide their faces and fight like little bitches.   

When I was 14 years old, I came out of the closet; ragingly, noisily, and utterly fearlessly.  I won’t say it was easy on my family, but they also knew that to try and convince me to go along quielty was to go back on everything they had taugtht me growing up.  I knew who I was.  Who the hell are you?

Yes, I was teased mercilessly.  Yes, they vandalized our house.  They yelled and threw things from passing cars.  They picked fights with my friends and even my brother, but never me.  None of them could stand and look me in the eye and say jack shit.  I faced down classmates, cops, and teachers.  I always stood my ground.  They never could.

I don’t know what it’s like to be black in America, any more than a heterosexual person knows what it’s like to be gay in America.  But I have learned a thing or two about the inside group by being on the outside.  The truth of every reactionary is that they’re cowards.  They live life in a never-ending feedback cycle of ignorance and fear.  Fear makes them ignorant, but it’s their ignorance that makes the world so frightening.

I know what it’s like to walk out the door every morning knowing that the world is against you.  I know what it means to have people make assumptions about your character based on nothing but their own ignorant suppositions.  I know what it’s like to stand in a room full of strangers and feel their hate and suspicion beating down hard on my neck.

I am not a racist.  I could never be a racist.  Because I, unlike all conservatives, know what it’s like to look at another person who is radically different from myself and think, "Except for an accident of birth, that could be me." 

The only way you could be a right-winger is to think that somehow, God has made you and your kind better than everybody else.  You have to so believe in your entitlement that you think your privilege is some kind of God-given right.  You can’t accept or comprehend the notion that on the inside you are no different than that black man, that Palestinian woman, this homeless family, or that billionaire.  No better.  No worse.

The Rightards hate universities because that’s where people go to learn about lives and cultures which are different from theirs.  It’s an axiom that the more educated people become, the more liberal they are.  

Here’s a hint, Reich Wingers.  Education makes you S M A R T E R.  Smarter people are more liberal.  Maybe if you would pull your heads out of your asses, you’d understand the world a little better and see how wrong-headed and moronic you’re being.

But in the meantime, know this.  As long as there is breath in my lungs, I will fight you.  And we will beat you.  Because in the end, our side is, quite simply, smarter.  You’ve gotten what you have by blunt trauma, but it’s all about to slip right through your fingers because you aren’t smart enough to hang on to it.  You may win a battle here and there, but we’ll win the war.  Bet on it.

And finally, this.  Any of you who think Jane and I are closet racists?  

Mr. Cash has a message for you:

 cash

Note: Due to an infestation of trolls, comments on this post have been closed. 

Related posts:

  1. Late Night: I Love Everything about America, Except for Charles Krauthammer, Who Is Kind of a Dick
  2. Pride And Petulance
  3. Late Night: Chuck Norris — A Love Song
  4. Love of Liberty and Health Care in America
  5. Southerners love TRICARE, The Public, Single-Payer Health Plan for Military Families