But do we really listen as white people? The recent historical facts say otherwise in the South especially. This man who ran for president of the United States in 1968 said this: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth [the white race] I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny… and I say… segregation now… segregation tomorrow… segregation forever.” This quote and his expressed sentiment is not a bad apple or an anomaly; dozens of US senators, governors, sheriffs, attorney generals during the post WWII time period said similar quotes. One U.S. senator wrote a whole book about committing genocide against black Americans in 1947 and wrote a 20 page law that wrote in great detail and submitted to congress how to get rid of most the black Americans. I don’t have room for all the quotes I’ve collected, though I’ve read the record of the law from the Congressional record. That attitude expressed is one with a deep unwillingness to listen to anyone.

There is no dialogue possible. When Senator Sumners made a speech (also on the Congressional record) in 1856 that slavery should be a abolished, the Senator Preston from South Carolina got so angry he beat his head in with his cane, bludgeoning him repeatedly, unable to tolerate the idea of equality, which sent Senator Preston into a blinding savage rage where he almost killed a man and literally left the floor of Congress bloody. Fellow Senator from South Carolina Ben Tillman got into a bloody fight on the floor on Congress in 1901 for a similar reason; not surprising form a man who openly boasted “We used to kill negros and stuff ballot boxes.”

So yes, an angry one-side diatribe does no one any good, but it was how those senators got elected, ran for political office, and kept them in power—so it did them some good. The rest of us had to live with their rage though. When I moved down South in the mid-nineties, a white man told me to shut up after I said something he found disagreeable, or he would beat my face in. He said this in front a group of students, he was a student, and I was a teacher. I did shut up, afraid of getting my face beat in, which he would have, as he came up to me when I sat down only a foot away. The six others int eh halfway stared in silence at his violence. I had never seen or witnessed such a violent outburst at such a trivial comment from a stranger who I never meet. When I went back into the classroom, I realized why the women and black students were so quite and polite. The encounter permenantly changed my view.