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Making
the Crackers Crumble
It's time to put all racists and reactionary icons back in their
place
By J.B. Borders
Let's
face it, crackers--that peculiarly seedy subset of American
Caucasians--have gotten out of hand lately. I don't simply mean
Trent Lott, the embattled U.S. senator from Mississippi,
exercising his constitutional right to speak his
gone-with-the-wind mind in public. No, the problem is much
larger than one befuddled opportunist.
Country music, stock car racing, rassling, Confederate flags,
tattoos, racism and lynchings have always gone hand in hand. It
is no coincidence that all--except the barbecuing of black
folk--are extremely visible and profitable at present in white
communities across this land.
For our own well-being, then, it's time we put all these
crackerisms in check. They are, as Lott said apologetically
about racial segregation, "a stain on the nation's
soul."
Trent Lott, you may recall, achieved popularity initially as a
cheerleader at Ole Miss in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He
carried the Confederate flag onto the football field. That flag
waving helped him get into law school at Ole Miss (he didn't
know that in those days all he had to do was be white and show
up on the doorstep) and later into a career in politics.
On December 16, 2002, a day that shall live in infamy in the
annals of KKKlandom, Lott went on BET to reiterate to African
Americans everywhere that segregation is illegal and immoral and
that he has been such a good friend to the dark people of
Mississippi that it would be immodest to point out that the
space research center at Jackson State University is named in
his honor. Reports are that when he first attracted notoriety
for his verbal indiscretions, Lott even called Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice to publicly vouch for him. Both, however,
declined.
The timing of this latest racist brouhaha couldn't have been
worse. Lott's son, Chester, had just signed on with The
Livingston Group, a powerful Washington, DC, lobbying firm. The
operation is headed by Bob "Family Values" Livingston,
the former right-wing Congressman from suburban New Orleans who
had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives for the
106th Congress before leaving public office in 1999 in the wake
of an extramarital sex scandal. Livingston has apparently
decided it is more profitable to be the seducer rather than the
seduced, so he has become an influential and well-paid political
lobbyist.
For the senior Lott, who had just been elected Senate majority
leader, the new connection with his former Congressional
colleague from the Solid South meant he and his family were
finally in position to really start raking in the big dough. The
set-up was too sweet. Then Pops opened his big Mississippi mouth
and gave his adversaries all the ammunition they would need to
thwart his ambitions.
Heart of Dixie
Before I go any further, let's be candid about a couple of
things: since the Reagan era, we have generally interpreted
"Republican" as code for white supremacist,
"conservative" as a byword for de facto
segregationist, "neo-con" as synonymous with suited
confederate. And long before Reagan, "right wing"
always meant racist.
Moreover, there is a corollary between how the Bush
administration feels about Iraq and how we should feel about
American racism. Baby Bush feels that if the U.S. had clobbered
Iraq the last time it went to war with that nation, there would
be no need to fight it again.
In our case, of course, if we had wiped out the racists when we
had them on the run in the '60s-the 1860s-we wouldn't have to
constantly beat back the Trent Lotts, Strom Thurmonds and Jesse
Helmses of the world. We wouldn't have to still be dealing with
Confederate flag controversies in South Carolina, Georgia, and
Mississippi.
In New Orleans, we wouldn't still be tolerating the indignity of
having a statue of the defeated Civil War traitor Robert E. Lee
towering over a prominent intersection (with its back--some say
its behind--turned to the north in true unreconstructed redneck
fashion). It is a blatant and intentional symbol of racism and
white supremacy--and it needs to go. By the same token, we
should have found a new name for Jefferson Davis Boulevard and a
new home for the Confederate Museum many years ago.
"And," to appropriate the words of the infamous Trent
Lott again, "if the rest of the country had followed our
lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these
years either."
Solid South
Since all our lemming-like political leadership is spouting off
about regionalism these days and the need for us to maximize our
assets, why not sell the lot (no pun intended) of our
confederate monuments to the state or to our neighboring
communities. Both Kenner and Slidell are named for Confederate
heroes. Let them buy these unwanted assets from New Orleans and
use them to brand their communities. We need the money; they
need an identity. Let's make a deal.
Deep down, I believe the world should be large enough for white
supremacists and normal self-determining black folk. But when
the interests of overreaching rednecks clashes with those of
striving people of African descent, then I am siding with the
black folk 100 percent of the time. In practical terms, that
means lots of white racists have to be corralled in, their greed
checked, their destructive behaviors circumscribed. Trent Lott,
obviously, is one such miscreant. It's time to send him back to
his trailer park for good.
Lott, of course, doesn't agree with that analysis. Neither,
apparently, does an Insipid Northern Negro (INN) columnist for
the New York Times. He says it's not necessary to remove Senator
Lott from his post as Senate majority leader. He says we just
have to keep our eye on him. That's mighty white of him, that
INN. Of course, he's not alone in his views. The organized corps
of ultra-conservatives supports that position, too. So do a few
Southern Insipid Negroes (SINs). But you must have already
guessed that not all INNs need be northern.
At any rate, this let's-go-easy-on-racists attitude has put all
kinds of fools in public office and permitted lots more idiots
in the private sector to start acting out. Now they want to go
gallivanting across the globe, toppling governments, hording
natural resources, controlling access to markets, ordering
troops into battle, bogarting their way into being 21st century
neo-colonial masters of the universe.
Flaunting White Supremacy
This is how bad the situation has become: Last month, 18 of the
world's largest and best-known European and white-American
museums issued a joint declaration that they would not return
artifacts in their possession that were looted from such
countries as Egypt, Nigeria and Greece. They just flat out said
they really didn't care how the museums acquired these treasures
in days of yore, the fact was they were in possession of them
now and they were never sending these antiquities back to their
countries of origin, damn what the rest of the world thinks.
Now, when some little cotton-tailed museum directors can be that
flippant without getting their faces slapped in retaliation,
then you know crackers in general are full of themselves.
Imagine how high-handed the oil men and the bankers must be in
their dealings abroad.
This is delusion of the highest order. White folks are less than
20 percent of the world's population. And they haven't proved to
be exceptional at anything except killing whatever they have
tried to control. But if we don't put our foot down and tell
them "No, you cannot disrespect us or violate our rights
any more," then we are simply empowering them to actualize
their fantasies.
Who do we think we're fooling? The Robert E. Lee statue, for
example, is a blatant piece of racist propaganda, every bit as
odious as the old Liberty Monument. And the only reason more
black people are not in arms about it is because most of them
don't yet know what an insult that statue was intended to be to
us. When more people are informed, there will be more public
outcry. But it shouldn't have to come to that. The city council
should do the right thing and get rid of this racist monument
without us having to act ugly first.
So, it's time to stop the foolishness. It's time to fire the lot
of racists and to get rid of these insulting Confederate
monuments scattered across our city. It is time to put the Old
South to rest for good. It's time to launch a new frontal
assault on racist terror in the U.S. It's time for our political
leaders to stop whistling Dixie and stand up for us. It's time
to round up the neo-Klansmen and send them to Undoing Racism
workshops where they can learn there is life after white-skin
privilege.
Later on, they will thank us for it--and the world will be a
much safer place.
Borderline
12.02
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J.B. Borders is a social commentator
and cultural critic. He is also president of J.B. Borders &
Associates, a management consulting firm specializing in
strategic planning, fund development, and program implementation
and evaluation for nonprofit organizations. Borders was the
founding editor of the New Orleans Tribune and an erstwhile
editor of The Black Collegian Magazine. He has also served as
managing director of the National Black Arts Festival and
executive director of the Louisiana Division of the Arts.
Borders earned a bachelor's and a master's degree at Brown
University, where he co-founded Rites & Reason Theatre in
1969.
James B. Borders IV /
J.B. Borders & Associates /
3655 Piedmont Drive /
New Orleans, LA 70122-4775 /
504 945-7015, voice & fax
504 442-1645, mobile / jamesbborders4@cs.com
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update 1 October
2008 |
