Knowing Your Place
When Black Lives Matter
I remember when Essie Mae Washington-Williams came out as Strom Thurmond’s daughter…she held a News Conference, after he died. You can probably Google it.
I remember my Dad looked at her and said, “Oh…, that explains my mother”. I assume because Essie Mae had the same complexion, similar features as Shanny. It’s not like my family didn’t know that my grandmother and her brother were half white (she also had a black brother that lived with the family and my aunts told me in 1991) — it just wasn’t talked about.
“It wasn’t to my advantage to talk about anything that (Thurmond) had done,” Washington-Williams said in 2003. “It certainly wasn’t to the advantage of either one of us. He of course, didn’t want it to be known. Neither did I. We didn’t have any agreement about not talking about it, we just didn’t talk about it.”
For more than 60 years, the two engaged in a clandestine relationship that included financial support, birthday cards, and occasional face to face meetings — but no deep emotions. At one point, Thurmond used one of his nephews as a financial go-between, but that man was never told exactly who he was helping.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams
But “denial is not just a river in egypt”.
We cannot continue to DENY that racism is so deeply entrenched in the USA, that for Essie Mae to have ANY type of relationship with her father, she had to “know her place” and never speak about it. She knew this intrinsically, because this has been taught to EVERY African American that survived being enslaved or ruled by outrageous Jim Crow laws. It still exists today. Black lives are expendable so you better stay alert.
This is what you get when a whole race of people live under unrestrained “yt people rule”, which means black lives don’t matter: you could be lynched at ANY time, for ANY infraction.
Black folks needed to “know their place”, …to stay ALIVE.
We think slavery was bad, well Reconstruction was worse because of the FALSE FREEDOM. No one enforced this new “freedom” or dealt with the VIOLENT yt resentment. No way are black people allowed, to rise above a yt person. Yt people burned down whole neighborhoods and randomly chased and killed black people for years. Lynchings took place like a Friday night sports game, in the Deep South. Yt People drove for miles to watch them and brought thier kids to witness and celebrate the torturous event.
That is why I fucking hate Florida. Not because of the yt people, but because of what I witnessed, in how this one black guy was acting…just like he was still on the plantation, because for whatever reason, he HAD to live that way to stay alive, in 1982.
We are now living through a new time of “yt rule and encouraged resentment” and I have to say…I have actually been rethinking my move to Northern Michigan, where my wife is from. I just don’t know if I am ready to deal with “yt trump supporter republicans” because they exist up there. Currently I live in an historic neighborhood in Detroit that is mostly black. Detroit is an 88% black city. This has been my life for 50+ years. So to me, it feels as if the odds that I will have to “know my place”, to prevent a “situation”, multiplies, exponentially.
This is real talk.
Our POTUS has literally placed a target on all black, brown, lgbtq people, and equal rights for women. Hate crimes are up more than I have ever experienced, in my lifetime, for a reason.
I guess…someone didn’t “know their place”.
