You Got Hate in your Heart Let it out
White power. Suffused by all the resentment, contempt, and willful ignorance that nonstop church and tv breed in lower middle class and poor lives.
But this should serve to unite the poor of all races, not divide them. Because misery and uncertainty bind the world’s permanent underclass. And poor people of all colors-creeds have one thing in common:
Always having been the only ones to truly, righteously suffer. Permavictims.
Black power is justified; white power is 2,000 years of western civ
Whether enslaved Africans. Depression-era, working class whites haunting the inhuman hellscapes of turn-of-the-century industrial wastelands. Or today’s immiserated yellow and brown sweatshop class. We all share the same impoverished future looming on the horizon of an imminent postracial, postgender, alteverything, monetized trumpocalypse.
The difference between white power and black power is that white power is defined by the suffering and at the expense of minorities they actively seek to oppress. And makes no sense because whites have ruled for 2,000 years.
Whereas black power has essentially nothing to do with crackers. It’s all about pride, self-empowerment, and rugged individualism against the man. Whatever color he be. Hillbilly jackass conservatives should understand that.
It’s a reaction not only to racial oppression at the hands of whites, but slavers of all colors-creeds worldwide.
Everybody else was slaving so why couldn’t we
Fucking whitey’s got very little do with it. But despite this, black life has been delineated and defined by its relationship to the white world ever since Portuguese slavers first showed up on African shores in the 15th century. To blight the continent for the next half millennium.
Exacerbating chronic, preexisting intertribal and sino-indo-arab slavery. And laying the groundwork for the legacy of violence and hate that eurochristian explorers, industrialists, soldiers, and missionaries would leave behind. As they furiously pounded the rest of the world into submission.
Surrounded by dead-end jobs and dying towns, it’s hard for poor whites to see this history beyond the horizon of yon cornfield. Just like there’s never been a light at the end of the tunnel for poor blacks. Their view obscured by burnout ghetto highrises. Ravaged by the war on negroes. I mean drugs.
Both demographics numb to all hope and optimism. Because the rest of the world remains so distant and disinterested. Even despite all the connectivity and amenities of modern life. No one cares.
Sneering whites may no longer shit in holes, but they sure do live in them.
Small towns
Because nowhere are there more judgmental, treacherous, angry people to be found than in rural, whitewing flyover hell. Godfearers, gunclingers, and churchgoers are some of the worst fuckers imaginable.
And they revel in their bullish arrogance, mulish ignorance, unwillingness to modernize, and wanton cruelty. Reveling in that shit like pigs at the 4-H fair.
Nearest airport hundreds of miles away. Interstate four counties over. Train never came through these parts. Last to be rurally electrified, plumbed, and connected to the grid. Phone, tv, and internet latecomers. Isolated for generations. Resentful of that shit on so many multifarious levels.
Just imagine being born a poor, uneducated white in the pre-civil rights 40s-50s. Somewhere deep in dipshit country. When they still had lynchings.
Where the only respectable way to refer to blacks was to call the spade a nigger. Local leaders and your government approved of and even encouraged such hatreds. The darkest thing for miles around was drumsticks and thighs. And all your white friends agreed it should be.
Then at the end of the century in a stunning turn of events, your way of life becomes the butt of all jokes. Your grandson weans on Tupac, granddaughter dates black guys, and the most seminal tv show of their generation is at stereotypical rednecks’ expense. Featuring a blind, black white supremacist relentlessly mocking you.
Deeply offended by your being so easily offended
Uttering outrageously offensive things like: “If anyone’s gonna have sex with my sister, it’s gonna be me!”
You’ve never been more deeply offended in your life. And you fear for your country. Kids these days just don’t know what’s good for them. Ain’t got no judgment at all. Someone needs to set this country back on the right track. Make it great again! USA, USA! Heil something.
Not only are minorities, migrants, and their strange customs and languages foreign; everything is. The world has changed around you. You really don’t like it. And you wonder why things can’t just be like they used to.
Well, there are many reasons. That were clear to most people for the last 60 years. If you can’t understand why minorities fear you and are appalled by the shit that falls out your mouth, you are a prisoner of yesterday’s world.
And the rest of us will just have to muddle through the future without you.
Indiana
Racialized history is more acute in some backwoods than others. Hoosiers for instance had the biggest klan: a quarter million-strong. And they’re not even in the south.
They also ignominiously elected kkk governor Ed Jackson in 1925. And grand imperial dragon wizard Jeff Berry called one of their small, wholesome alt-American towns home right up until the very end of the troubled 20th century. Just down the road from where I was raised.
People muttered about him all the time, but I never could tell if it was scorn or reverence. Doubtless many approved.
Because it wasn’t so very long ago that hoosiers claimed the dubious distinction of hosting the last lynching in the north.
On a sweaty summer night in 1930, a mob in the town of Marion tore open the jail, lynched two black men accused of raping a white woman and murdering her white lover, and then took pictures for one of the last, most popular postcards depicting lynchings in early 1900s heartland USA.
The practice of circulating these gruesome images by mail became so prevalent by 1908 that the postmaster general felt compelled to ban it. And if you think that is an infringement on free speech, you should think harder.
85 years later in that same shit podunk town, asshole hillbilly assistant fire chief Rick Backs ties a noose and throws it in front of the only black guy in the room during a standard ropes and knots training he was leading for new recruits. A white guy in the northern town that lynched the last black men before the state assumed the job of executions thought this was ok. 150 years after the civil war.
And there’s even an apocryphal story that a hillbilly jackass saloon somewhere out in the backwoods had faux taxidermies of the Kennedys and assassinated civil rights icons MLK and Malcolm X mounted over the bar.
Indiana also boasts the last senator expelled from office. In 1862, the senate voted to unceremoniously send copperhead confederate sympathizer Jesse Bright back to his homestate. After he arranged an illegal arms sale between an Indiana gun company and the Confederate States of America.
All these fuckers’ favorite part of the constitution is the second change to it.
Copperheads
Like today’s racists in self-denial, those northerners who openly supported the south in the civil war were renowned for their vicious rhetoric and hateful hypocrisy.
The former best embodied by contemporaneous Wisconsin newspaper editor Marcus Pomeroy. Who called Lincoln “fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism.”
And the latter by the stunning sanctimony of such men’s heirs who go around claiming Lincoln was America’s finest president. But would have given John Wilkes Booth a standing ovation had they been at Ford’s Theater.
Now if you read this and it troubles you not because of black suffering, but because of bridling at the white guilt concept of atonement for ancestral sins, you are a racist.
And that is likely why people regularly call you one.
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