Another day at the Black American Office
Suddenly Cheney Turns a Dark Shade of Negro
I’ve just heard the terrible and horrible threats that were left as messages of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two traitors to Trump who sit on the January 6th committees. If you hear them, you will be appalled at the casual death threats made against them.
If you’re a black American though, you might want to close your ears. You could get PTSD from some threats maybe you heard made against your parents, your grandparents, maybe even the tense threats you heard in the sound of the white male policeman who pulled you over while eating a burger in your car. I admit I’m not sure; I’m not you.
But it seems that black Americans have gotten threats that were unwarranted, unjustified, and certainly at threat or “microaggression” is vastly disproportional to whatever it is you were perceived of as doing. Correct me if I’m wrong with your comments, but hear me out first.
Having moved from the North to the South, to northeast Mississippi, for my first year of graduate study, I recognized those four Southern white male voices right away. I mean I didn’t know them, just heard that Southern whiteness. It wasn’t just a drawl or southern “twang;” I heard that tension ready to do violence that simmered just below the surface that reignited by visceral experiences.
This “Yankee” encountered many situations where I confronted this brewing hatred and felt like there were several moments I faced real brutal violence. One of which burned into my memories still gives me a light touch of PTSD. The immediate threat of Southern violence.
By whites. I can’t recall any racial tension from black Americans. I’ve thought about this for a while now. None of the black Americans in the classroom, the grocery stores, the places of daily encounters, showed any hostility or exhibited any sort of emotion or tone of voice that sounded hostile. Maybe they sensed I was a Yankee and saw me talking to them and listening to them the same way I did to my white students. Maybe they were partly conditioned not to confront whites. Maybe both, who knows. But I never heard or felt not at ease. I never felt the hard undercurrent of violence ready to pounce on me contained in the white males, the whites cops who I reported a violent threat against me, the drunk whites in the bar.
All these four callers, they all sounded like a bunch of Southern rednecks who were threatening Representative White conservative Christians Kinzinger and Cheney. They reflected the deep attitude found elsewhere come to think of it, of many of those extremists launching anonymous threats to poll workers in Georgia or Michigan I know they were. But that militia armed racism seen in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan still to me seems best represented by these four voices of the white Southern apocalypse.
Not a coincidence, since democracy only visited the South briefly from 1865–1876. Black Americans who got a brief taste of democracy during that time then got lynched out of power and voting until 1965. One percent of blacks were registered to vote in the 1960 presidential election. None of them I’ve heard actually did. In the rest of the South, it was three percent who were registered.
White America had stood the whole time not interfering in the lynchings until MLK and the Freedom riders. That’s when Democracy just came to the South once again. Ask Bennie Thompson, head of the Committee, and now a “respected colleague” of Ms. Cheney.
He was one of the first black Americans elected in the 1960s in Mississippi, a state where no black voted for JFK because no black was allowed to vote. Ask him what his parents thought of the promise of democracy. Ask him why his parents, his family, his neighbors, couldn’t vote in a mostly black American part of the state until he was elected.
He might tell you that those threats you white Americans are hearing on CNN, they just remind him what he’s heard during the first decades of his life. And the threats are at least better than the received violence in the democracy-less South that Emmett Till experienced.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are just getting taste of the Southern supremacist threat that Bennie Thompson and fellow Southern black Mississippians got their whole lives up to 1970 (at least — he’s probably still getting threats), and their whole parent’s lives, their whole grandparent’s lives.
It sounds sick, and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but: I’m actually glad to hear them threatened; now they know the violent vitriol that lies at the heart of their party. Their colleagues like AOC suffer these threats daily. These supremacist threats are suffered perhaps deepest by black Americans in the South, and probably black Americans in most of America.
Welcome to Black America Ms. Cheney, Mr. Kinzinger, the receiving end of your party's caustic cruelty. I hope you survive the experience. Because those threats you got and felt, by those Southern male voices, are probably no surprise to black Americans, just another day at the office they might call stop-and-frisk America.
