“This week has completely drained me. I am failing at seeing how to move forward. Failing at seeing how I can protect my family. Y’all, it’s been tough.”
I saw those words in a social-media post this morning by a lovely woman I met years ago in Jackson—a Mississippian engaged in her community and a loving wife and mother who lives in service and drinks up life. Like so many, she clearly fears the future right now as we are navigating a nation where a plurality of Americans chose bigotry, hate, misogyny and efforts to roll back every possible gain that communities long held back by a boot on their necks have made since slavery and early American abuse of immigrants. The very legislation and constitutional amendments that helped slowly turn that old frigate around are now targets of our new president and his acolytes.
Thugs who showed up at the U.S. Capitol and killed police officers are now free with a Go Ahead and Kill Another Cop Card.
Immigrant haters are recruiting private contractors, ex-law enforcement, especially “tough hard-nosed individuals,” to move “human cargo” out of the U.S. after they are dragged out of their homes and communities.
Rapists and abusers are ascending to the highest levels of our government no matter how much evidence indicts them as the worst possible human beings.
For many, “DEI Hire” has become an epithet and synonym for anyone but a white man, with bigots fully taking advantage of leaders telling them it’s OK to want people fired or rejected because presumably they got a free pass and don’t “merit” their positions (at least to them). For these kind of people, open bigotry and racist threats and lies are the key “free speech” Americans are no longer welcome to engage in freely and openly like they did in my childhood, even as a woman bishop is supposed to apologize for urging an elected public servant to have “mercy” on human beings.
To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, what stale, ugly hell is this?
Racism: An American Standard
I cannot possibly understand what Black and Brown people are going through in this nation right now: the fear, the disbelief that a president would try to stop all efforts to deal with our deep and horrific history of racism, racist terrorism and outright theft of resources from people who aren’t white. I sure feel the weight of these times as a woman and a rape survivor and as a person who would never judge people’s identities and think that somehow one could lead a healthy and happy life going around spewing bigotry and ugliness.
I damn well know that I don’t want a repeat of the deadly disease that infected my hometown of Philadelphia, Miss.—and the darkness that it caused for families who lost their loved ones to mob violence. My town was scarred forever by the worst of humanity—from the cops and fellow KKK members who killed three young men seeking freedom and respect for all to the rich businessman who offered his land as a secret burial plot out near the Neshoba County Fairgrounds. They also doomed the people who remained—Black, white and Choctaw—who had to then live in a place many across the world began to consider the most racist place on earth.
My hometown wasn’t that—mob race violence has been an American standard north to south, east to west since the nation’s founding—but it was a place where the darkest kind of hate exploded into a hellscape of violence because a bunch of dumbass white men thought they were better than people with darker skin tones.
Since then, for decades, we’ve had politicians in our state fight to keep us in that kind of stale hell instead of being actual leaders to help people turn the corner away from the ugly beliefs of our ancestors. They’ve done it for power and greed, and many of them (or their kids) are now gleeful that the old times not forgotten are here again. They use slightly different code words, and claim they are for equality—but only if that means that white folks and those who bow to them are running things again while ignoring the generational effects of all the white terrorism and discrimination. They seem to believe that being white should automatically bring some sort of elevated merit and the right to judge it in others.
It’s the natural way, you know.
Far More Than a Partisan Problem
Let me be clear: This arc of history is far more than a partisan problem. Racism, and the belief that certain white men need to be in control, cuts across parties and always has. We’ve never fully dealt with that inherited belief. For most of my life, I’ve been talking and writing until I was red in the face about how we all need to know and face our real history—and I’ve been told off just as often by so-called liberals (white men and women) when I talk about the realities and embedded goals of, for instance, segregation academies as a tool of oppression and white supremacy. This is what they were built to be; it’s in the DNA. And that includes the rosy and exculpatory white history they teach.
I remember writing columns about hate on the Internet for the Village Voice in the years around the millennium, and white New Yorkers telling me the worst thing was to give all those hicks attention—even as a certain powerful businessman was working an inside job right there on Fifth Avenue. (I even got in trouble with white publishers of two local New York City newspapers I edited for a while when I wrote a column that called that golden-toilet businessman “the tacky rich.”)
“Ignore them, and they’ll go away. They’re outliers,” friends and colleagues would tell me about the rising wave of hate online as I published detailed “Machine Age” columns in the Voice. I, a native Neshoba Countian, knew that wasn’t true—and that Americans don’t understand our history.
Racism is a contagious cancer, and it’s fed by ignorance propagated by all the people who don’t want to admit they benefited or that their families were all up in the violence. That’s why avoiding censorship matters so much; real information is a form of chemotherapy that can kill the cancer, so the bigots forbid and censor historic facts. It’s what Joseph Goebbels was so good at during the Nazi rise—spreading the poison through lies, censorship and frothing up the locals to hate other locals.
This con never works in the long run, but it leaves mass destruction and human pain in its wake. Everyone ends up worse off—and the people of any nation galloping toward fascism are about to go through ugly times with most coming out worse on the other end. And that includes the conspirators who think it’s all fun and wealth until reality catches up to them. Fascism is way beyond partisanship. That pestilence doesn’t stop at red or blue. It can take us all down.
‘Racists Don’t Go Down Without a Fight’
I read my friend’s post today after going a bit underground so far this year, buried in work that matters to me, joyful domestic activity with my partner in our home, January sorting and culling, playing with our pets, reaching out to family and friends, and supporting my journalism team. I haven’t spent inordinate time despairing at every new shocker that hits the news—because none of it surprises me. It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve documented this ugliness in America—and the reasons for it—for many, many years.
It’s no secret why I turned to my friends the night Barack Obama first won the presidency and said, “Get ready. Racists don’t go down without a fight.” We have never been a “post-racial” nation as naive pundits tried to tell us. In 2016, I believed Donald Trump would win the election—because the nation had not fully faced our past and too much history was buried—and even New York Republicans had nominated him for the presidency.
I don’t know how much difference my words can make right now, although they will keep coming as I’m ready to write them. I do not obey in advance. Ask anyone who knows me.
What I do know is that human connection with fellow loving family and friends, new and old, is now more important than ever—especially coming out of the necessary isolation of a pandemic into this mess. Also important are joy, laughter, creativity, art, good food, pets, gardening—everything that makes life worth cherishing. I’ve long wondered what I would do if our nation bowed fully to hate and our democracy started its descent, but I know now that whatever we can do to right the ship must start with connecting with others.
It is also OK to disconnect from those mired in hate and bigotry. They don’t have a right to your presence or to force you to listen to their rants. Remember this. Protect yourself.
I urge you to not fall into despair, which helps cede your power. Don’t despair: gather good people around you who don’t dwell in hate and crave power over others. Don’t despair: entertain and laugh together. Don’t despair: have good conversations that may just solve things. Don’t despair: share. Don’t despair: love deeply.
‘Democracy Is a Struggle‘
I have confidence that this darkness, too, can and shall pass, just as every activist and change agent who has ever walked this planet believed. It’s what spurred them to action and to not give up and be mired in anguish and hopelessness—they live deeply as they work and fight for a better community and more loving world.
As I heard Bob Moses say in a powerful speech in 2003 at Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County on the anniversary of the assassination of Mississippian James Chaney, and New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner by people I knew: “Freedom is a struggle.”
That means it is a verb—that to maintain it, you have to take action to keep freedom going, over and over and over again. That means studying history to know what you’re seeing and learn how others have solved the problems. Putting freedom on a shelf and not talking about it again because you think it no longer needs nourishment is a fool’s game, even if it’s an American way. There are always folks (barely) in the shadows waiting to destroy it thanks to our rosy denial of what can happen next.
The same goes for democracy—which is, by definition, freedom for every human despite all those who want it just for themselves.
To those who are the primary targets now of all the hate, stereotypes and outright lies, know that I see you, and I will use my gifts to help however I can, and I will get out and connect with you going forward. To be honest, I don’t know another way to live other than believing that we all have the equal right to be free, including from bigotry and other people’s determination that their beliefs rule us all.
Be clear: No person is less human or deserving of mercy than another no matter what those gleeful about dehumanizing others to build up their egos and power try to tell us. We are not free, nor fully human, if we don’t stand up for fellow human beings’ right to exist and be treated with dignity and as equals.
Attacks this week on the bishop who called for mercy for immigrants and other now-targeted Americans remind me of one of many biblical verses instructing how to treat fellow human beings, especially those in need: “Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” Too often these days, we witness the exact opposite from the people with the most power in our nation and those who claim to be model Christians.
Freedom is everything—and no one can have a monopoly on it or define it for the rest of us. We will prevail, but only together.
Correction: In the first version of this essay, Donna Ladd misspelled Michael Schwerner’s last name. She apologizes for the error.
Read Donna Ladd’s full Democracy essay series here.
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.