Seeing the reaction of some of the white people I grew up with to the Black Lives Matter movement has me thinking a lot about the beliefs I’ve left behind. It frustrates me that they can’t see how offensive some of their comments are while simultaneously claiming that they don’t have a racist bone in their body. But then again, I never considered myself racist either. After all, I was the little white girl in rural Kentucky whose hero was Harriet Tubman, loved I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and never missed The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman whenever…

You would assume someone would have let me know that the title of my prize-winning poem in the 1981 Lincoln Days Writing Contest should have been “If Lincoln were Running for President Today” before I stood up before the Women’s Club and read it. I guess the lack of punctuation and lines like “And he wasn’t no Rockefeller honey” were clues that this piece was written in colloquial English, so grammar wasn’t an issue.

This is the 39th anniversary of the day I recited that poem and carried a wreath into the memorial building at Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site…

Not long after moving from Kentucky to Tucson in 2003, I went on a group camping trip to a few national parks. In a conversation with some of my fellow travelers I mentioned that I couldn’t understand why setting water out for immigrants who were dying by the hundreds in the desert was controversial. And they all laughed. And then one guy said, “Why don’t we just put a McDonalds in?” And they all laughed some more.

At the time, I did the same thing I’ve done my whole life. I rationalized it. They were nice to me and the…

I’m a middle-aged white woman from the South but my first thought when I woke up the morning after Donald Trump was elected president was, “I fucking hate white people”. And it wasn’t long after that I decided to finally satisfy my lifelong curiosity about my genetic origins by ordering a DNA test. In the commercials everyone finds out amazing things they never knew about themselves but when I got my results back there were no surprises. I’m 100% European. As my friend jokingly put it, I really am Miss Whitey McWhite White. …

TAKING COUNTRY CULTURE BACK FROM THE TRUMP DISCIPLES

Since the Republican primary was decided and the vast majority of people I grew up with in rural Kentucky fell in line behind Trump, I’ve been thinking a lot about the culture I grew up in. I left the state 14 years ago but the accent is still with me and so are a lot of sweet memories mixed in with the bitter ones. But I have to go back a long way to find a time when I wasn’t conflicted about my Southern identity.

Way back to June of 1971, when…