In early May, my brother and I drove over to Neshoba County to visit family on Fork Road, the winding country byway of my childhood. Sitting with him and the wife of our late older brother, parsing family stories, I picked their memories to figure out how many different houses my dirt-poor family had cycled through by the time I turned 6 and finally moved into a house with an indoor toilet. We counted six houses—one next to the fairground near where my parents picked cotton and my mama pulled me along on her cotton sack alongside a Black woman cotton-picker pulling her little girl, who became my first friend. We both had little cotton sacks and got change dropped into our outstretched hands at the end of each day from my rich-to-me Great Uncle Jimmy, who owned the fields.
We lived in no fewer than three rickety houses on Fork Road, in fact, before finally moving into one with a commode that I admittedly flushed too much just to be doing it. My brilliant mother couldn’t read or write—having never attended school a day in her life, due to her daddy insisting she cook for the field workers every day. And my anti-education Grandpa Ladd only let my also-smart dad Cliff go to third grade before being thrust into the fields and a life of alcoholism.
By the time we moved into the little house my Uncle J.C. built—next to my sister-in-law’s Fork Road home now—both my mama and daddy had worked so hard in a world they knew far too little about that they were both already in the difficult twilight of their lives. He would die, helped by alcohol and stress, of a heart attack at age 50; she made it to 65 before she had hers. Both were sick for my whole life in one way or another in that way that poor, working-class people often are.
You see, good information was hard to come by, other than the prejudices my people grew up soaking in like the hot peppers in the bottle of oil I watched my mother pour over her black-eyed peas and everything else. Snake-oil salesmen were everywhere, especially in politics, preaching hatred and “prejudice” as I grew to understand it. Poor whites were seen as an easy target; sell us lies about Black people and all the “others” supposedly out to take what real (white) Americans worked hard for with scant pay, even when working for family. I watched people around me on Fork Road and beyond follow the fabulists anywhere. The fat-cat wannabes knew the inherited, generational buttons to push to gain and keep power over us all.
I’ve long tried to explain to people how power seekers use and pander to poor, working-class white Americans with the promise that they aren’t, indeed, the bottom of the human barrel, no matter how hard they pushed us down there. The real pond scum, we were told, were those other people who put us there by taking what could have been ours. White people around me often were seeking something—anything—to be proud of on the way to too many becoming bigots and even murderers, as people I would later know did on a grandiose scale on Father’s Day 1964, three years after I was born there.
Bigotry is an entrenched power system. It’s instilled, inherited, fertilized, prolonged, stoked and carefully tended. It’s a way that the powerful distract people on the way to stabbing us in the back and hoping we don’t notice, at least until it’s too late. And when we did notice, it was always “those people’s” fault and not ours. And Lord knows, the problem was never the power brokers spewing the deflection and obfuscation later known as the “southern strategy,” even as that ugly game has existed across our nation throughout our history.
Of course, every time we’ve had a chance to turn the corner together, business-suit swindlers would froth up racism and distrust all over again to force us back into our corners so we point fingers at each other as they profit, laugh it up, and censor any history that shows either white brutality or different races banding together to try to forge a different path.
Weaponizing ‘Whiteness’
After reporter and native Mississippian Nick Judin—a city boy who hails from the metropolis of Jackson—wrote last week about the ICE arrest of Kasper Eriksen, the Mississippi Free Press weathered a storm of both adulation and criticism for his outstanding journalism done in classic Nick style. He conducted fantastic, fearless, piercing interviews in a nation where many journalists assume ICE won’t talk to them. He assembled an explanation of what exactly is happening in the detainment system that we haven’t seen elsewhere. And he shared details about conditions in the private prisons that are profiting off ICE arrests—the kind of specifics about systems and (in)humanity that we’re just not seeing much elsewhere. And certainly not inside and about Mississippi.
This was not a political story per se, at least any more than any story can become political. It was investigative, explanatory, human, probing, telling. As Nick said to me, it made no sense to stop and investigate how a detainee’s family voted in a story where he had to cut hundreds of words of powerful interviews about realities inside the ICE system. It is a story that is spawning other powerful think pieces, and a hell of a lot of conversation and debate, including Bill Kristol and company at The Bulwark flagging the work as “Pulitzer-grade reporting” and a think piece on whiteness by Noah Berlatsky.
Those pieces and many commenters, in their own way, are seeking to grapple with the question of “whiteness”—a social construct that basically means the assumed superiority of being white, not just having a lighter skin tone like mine. I like to say that “whiteness” is a tool to weaponize being white to hurt and control others and resources. Nick’s storytelling elevated the reality that a white man in ICE detention can more easily talk freely about his situation, and the people keeping him there were willing as well. It was about showing, not telling, a top goal of stellar journalism that can have a wider impact. And it’s the opposite of gotcha sensationalism, and more impactful over time.
We know well that people on both sides of Eriksen’s detention likely could speak more freely because he was white—Nick has also been speaking to non-white immigrants who are much more terrified to reveal their names—and that fact speaks loudly about American power and bigotry.
One of the more thoughtful comments I saw in response to Nick’s piece was by a woman on Bluesky: “What I’m not seeing is a story with experts on why white working-class voters continue (to) vote against their own interests,” she posted. “They lacked care until it directly impacted them.”
She certainly has a point about so many voters, generally, with the last sentence—and especially white Americans who, by virtue of our skin tone, can show up in the world by default with a certain amount of privilege, even if you didn’t have a john to flush. I know the leg-ups I got early in life wouldn’t have been there then if I wasn’t white—I was rough around the edges with terrible grammar—and that gives me a responsibility to pass it on to others who aren’t; that’s a no-brainer to me even if paying it forward terrifies the anti-“DEI” lobby.
Fact: Even those of us born poor and white with an outhouse and a Sears catalog are afforded a level of privilege over those we’re told we’re superior to. Wink wink, you’re not on the bottom like them, so “vote for me in November.” It’s hard to explain how much sway, tragically, that this con can have over people with nothing, minimal education, no path to success, scant trust in institutions, and too little time and interest in interrogating the lies we are soaked in and often fooled by from birth.
This isn’t an excuse. In fact, I agree with the Bluesky woman’s first sentence—that we need more probing of why working-class Americans vote against their interests—even if Nick’s piece was not that story. He correctly used his limited time to tell an urgent story about immigration, and ICE’s reach, that hadn’t been told, and that is creating dialogue—even if it is necessarily uncomfortable. Other stories can come later.
Growing Up Watching ‘The Game’
The truth is that I’ve been trying to break down the white working-class con to people who look like me over my entire adult life. I grew up watching it unfold generationally with one slick politician after another continually appealing to my people’s desire to be superior to somebody, anybody, even as they also stabbed us in the back pretending it was a supportive back slap. White politicians might show up at the trailer park then about as often as they visit Black churches now—right before an election.
Of course, Black people were an easy target considering the intentionally continual effects of slavery, the Confederacy and its apologists, Jim Crow and his Lost Cause, public-school de/re-segregation and eugenics and “replacement” fears in the U.S. And don’t forget the national impact of Hollywood’s high-profit, pro-Confederate propaganda like “Birth of a Nation,” where white people from Riverside, California, (where it opened) to Manhattan lined up to have any positive effects of the South losing the Civil War excised from their psyches as the powerful and well-heeled reconciled with white people of the South while consuming and internalizing racist mythology.
Not to mention that the national amnesia that fell over the United States after all of our “racial hygiene” propaganda contributed directly to the Holocaust, even as our power brokers limited Jewish and Basque children from refuge in the U.S.
Where I differ, I think, with the woman on Bluesky is that I think those of us who have lived it, and tried to survive and warn others about The Game (a more inclusive label I now prefer to “southern strategy”), are actually experts. And that’s with immense respect to all the race and inequity experts, historians and Movement leaders who have directly and indirectly taught me the missing parts of my people’s history, and how it works together as a system of lies and oppression, over all these decades.
When your mama drags you on her cotton sack through the Mississippi heat right next to a Black woman dragging her little girl who happens to be your first friend, and then everyone around you constantly dehumanizes your equals as “dirty” (insert ugly words) that you’re supposedly better than, you have two choices. You either internalize and repeat the same hatred, or you run from it and become your own kind of self-made expert, trying to warn other people about the monster perpetually in our midst. It takes a village, after all.
Or you become a quiet queen like my white fifth-grade teacher who acted intentionally after three little Black girls pushed and shoved me on the playground in Columbus, Georgia, in 1972, two years into forced integration. Knowing I like to read, Mrs. Yates then kept me in a classroom with a bookish Black girl reading quietly together for several recesses. We became good friends, and it never occurred to me to blame the other girls’ race for something any kids might’ve done. I later became friends with my taunters, too.
The Best Kind of Math
Call me crazy, or whatever name of choice you want to spew at me (I’m used to it), but I’ve dedicated so much of my life trying to both understand the curse of “whiteness”—yes, assumed superiority is a horrendous curse for whites, too, regardless of the benefits it brings here and there. I’ve tried to educate through story and testimony about how it unfolds and destroys people with the potential to be so much more than the vision of an evil, hateful ancestor (and often rapist) back in the 1860s who taught it forward. Yes, I have those ancestors. No, I don’t idolize them.
The Game is an ancient con. Politicians just keep recycling the same B.S. game of telling certain people they are better than others due to immutable qualities (like skin tone or national origin or head size), and it’s the masses, so to speak, who are hurt by it—because the purveyors of hatred and the receivers are both victims of the cancer of bigotry (not equally, of course). They keep doing it because it keeps working for their unoriginal and unambitious goals of power maintenance—and because so many of us stopped noticing and believing that the old can be new and horrifying all over again while ordering from Amazon and posting hot takes.
In every state. Not just Mississippi. Not just the South. Where you are.
Numbers are the way through this. Coalitions. Collaborations. Shared humanity. I’ve had the honor of spending significant time with outstanding civil-rights veterans like the late, great Jimmie Travis who put their lives on the line to change hearts, minds and laws back in the 1960s since I returned to Mississippi.
Usually laughing and nearly always huggers, freedom veterans told me stories of people coming together across differences in race, education and income levels to defend against the monster of hate and racism. And I know damn well why they bothered to spend valuable time mentoring and empowering me to each one, teach one, pass it on, speak loudly and widen the tent. Look no further than my skin tone. Bless them.
As a result of our sharing those lessons, disgusted and hopeful young Mississippians of all races have shown up on our publications’ threshold for over 20 years now wanting to pass their stories and lessons forward, too, and be part of something bigger than they were born into. Like I said, it’s the best kind of math.
‘The Solid Rock of Brotherhood‘
After my brother and I left my sister-in-law’s house, we wove around the rest of Fork Road, passing the cemetery where my parents, my oldest brother, my best friend of my youth and at least one of the lynch mobbers who killed Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner are buried. The Fork has transformed from the largely working-class community of my youth, then with hopeful rancher homes cropping up with colorful flower beds (many filled with Ladds thanks to Uncle JC) to a jarring number of those houses (now with fewer Ladds) crumbling with way too much of the kind of yard garbage that signifies to me hopelessness and inertia or, maybe, addiction and lack of decent services.
Deeper into the Fork where my Grandpa Ladd used to live surrounded by his adult kids, and near two of the toilet-free houses we rented, it has fully gentrified with newer big houses, nice fences and rolling grounds—and, that day at least, Trump signs.
As I drove and glared at my big brother for telling me when to down-shift, I thought of my favorite cousin who used to live in one of the now-crumbling houses. I always thought of him as different. He was kind, gentle, a real Jesus-following Christian as far as I could see among so many posers around me. Folks thought we were twins: cotton-blond hair, blue eyes. But when Barack Obama became president, I saw a different side of him emerge even as New York pundits declared us post-racial. He would come on my Facebook page and post the kinds of things I couldn’t bear seeing, much less allow my Black friends and colleagues to see inadvertently. I blocked him and haven’t seen him in years. I didn’t have the answer on how to help him see the light. Maybe I should’ve tried harder. I still love him, at least the younger version.
I do know that we can’t yell our way out of the curse of white superiority. (I have tried it, I assure you.) We’re living in a time when the weapon of whiteness is being locked, loaded and canonized, even as more and more white people will be demonized and destroyed by where the nation is now headed. Whiteness has never known its own boundaries because, remember, it’s really about addiction to wielding power. These are precarious times, and what we do, and say, now can have outsized impact when sheer numbers matter so damn much.
We need to become a powerful majority to turn back bigotry and inhumanity amid this fierce urgency of now—not as a coalition of humanity that agrees all the time, but one united to save democracy and to finally realize the dream of so many who gave their lives to save us. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us in 1963: “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”
The civil-rights veterans I’ve known taught me three major things: First, freedom will always be a struggle. Second, never back down and always always say what needs to be said—each one, teach many. And third, you don’t have to agree with everyone to have the grace to forgive and work with them. Because it really does take a diverse coalition of brave people willing to step up and out for others.
Dr. King told the nation in 1963: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” We’re at The Game’s precipice again, and now is the second-best time to come together to reject efforts to make bigotry and inhumanity the laws of the land.
We must stand on the backs of all who came before us—and win it this time. No other outcome will do.
Read all of Donna Ladd’s Democracy essays since 2024 here.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column 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.
Comments are closed.