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| April 5, 1976 Boston |
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Sunday, November 13, 2016
The White Mask Falls
The White Mask Falls
Well, you’ve finally done it-confirmed my gnawing doubts of the intelligence, open-heartedness, critical abilities, fair-mindedness and inclusiveness of so many Americans. You have, in electing this boorish, shallow, mendacious, racist, hyper-sensitive, bullying, huckster to be President, you’ve allowed the masks of civility and integrity to slip away and reveal your fears and your long-denied hatreds.
For a brief moment in history it became unacceptable to show blatant racism in polite company, so your preferred tactic was one of plausible deniability.
You believed if you didn’t yell Nigger, wear a Klan hood, make ape noises or toss bananas when Browns were around, if you coated your poison in what you called jokes, (and then called us poor sports for not laughing along), you could claim innocence-perhaps even convince yourself that your newly unfashionable impulses were undetectable so long as your acts of discrimination could be explained away as being something else, no matter how farfetched that explanation.
An example:
We were once lost one afternoon on Randall’s Island and tried to wave down a car to ask directions. The couple in the car, without stopping, drove on, close enough to spray dust on my shoes. When we later caught up with that couple down the road as they entered a building, I asked why they hadn’t stopped, one of them said, “I didn’t see you.”
I stand six-feet, four inches and weighed two-hundred-seventy pounds at the time, but this person, who had been sitting in the passenger seat; with whom I had made fleeting eye contact as they passed us, was willing to offer the gauze-thin excuse that I was somehow invisible. The pure brazenness of that excuse struck me. “Would you have seen me if I were white?”, I asked. That was met with a snort of derision and an angry, insulted wave of dismissal.
Plausible deniability
We see it in the sworn statements of police officers after another unarmed Brown has been taken from the world of time.
Plausible deniability
We see it in the willful mis-interpretation of ‘Black Lives Matter’, insisting it is a term of exclusion rather than one of revelation and aspiration. To an intellectually honest person it might have been less assailable had it been instead, ‘Black Lives Matter, Too’, but I fear you’d have nit-picked your way to seeing even that phrase as threatening, as being the cry of terrorists.
Plausible deniability.
It is more horrifying to me that you cannot all be explained away as yahoos and rednecks, because I’ve found some of you to be intelligent and coherent, and I’m sure most of you are not racists.
But you voted for one.
Plausible deniability
I am sure most of you would never subject wives, sisters, aunts, mothers to breast and pussy grabbing.
But you voted for one who does.
Plausible deniability
I am sure you would never attempt to delegitimize, solely because of his race, an elected President by questioning his citizenship.
But you voted for one who did.
Plausible deniability
You would never mock a handicapped man before a national audience.
But you voted for one who did.
Plausible deniability
Surely you would never approve of a sleazy, foul-mouthed radio host calling your twenty-three-year-old daughter “a piece of ass”.
But you voted for one who did.
As manumission gave rise to the Klan, as the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s gave us George Wallace’s campaign for the White House, the Presidency of a Brown gave us the election of perhaps the most unqualified, ill-tempered, profoundly, fundamentally flawed candidate in the history of The Union; one claiming he knows more than the Generals, that he, and he alone could solve our problems.
Don’t you know how transparent your condescension, contempt and dissembling are, and have always been? How, while you look through us, we see through you?
And now you’ve elected this man.
Your deniability is no longer plausible.
Well, you’ve finally done it-confirmed my gnawing doubts of the intelligence, open-heartedness, critical abilities, fair-mindedness and inclusiveness of so many Americans. You have, in electing this boorish, shallow, mendacious, racist, hyper-sensitive, bullying, huckster to be President, you’ve allowed the masks of civility and integrity to slip away and reveal your fears and your long-denied hatreds.
For a brief moment in history it became unacceptable to show blatant racism in polite company, so your preferred tactic was one of plausible deniability.
You believed if you didn’t yell Nigger, wear a Klan hood, make ape noises or toss bananas when Browns were around, if you coated your poison in what you called jokes, (and then called us poor sports for not laughing along), you could claim innocence-perhaps even convince yourself that your newly unfashionable impulses were undetectable so long as your acts of discrimination could be explained away as being something else, no matter how farfetched that explanation.
An example:
We were once lost one afternoon on Randall’s Island and tried to wave down a car to ask directions. The couple in the car, without stopping, drove on, close enough to spray dust on my shoes. When we later caught up with that couple down the road as they entered a building, I asked why they hadn’t stopped, one of them said, “I didn’t see you.”
I stand six-feet, four inches and weighed two-hundred-seventy pounds at the time, but this person, who had been sitting in the passenger seat; with whom I had made fleeting eye contact as they passed us, was willing to offer the gauze-thin excuse that I was somehow invisible. The pure brazenness of that excuse struck me. “Would you have seen me if I were white?”, I asked. That was met with a snort of derision and an angry, insulted wave of dismissal.
Plausible deniability
We see it in the sworn statements of police officers after another unarmed Brown has been taken from the world of time.
Plausible deniability
We see it in the willful mis-interpretation of ‘Black Lives Matter’, insisting it is a term of exclusion rather than one of revelation and aspiration. To an intellectually honest person it might have been less assailable had it been instead, ‘Black Lives Matter, Too’, but I fear you’d have nit-picked your way to seeing even that phrase as threatening, as being the cry of terrorists.
Plausible deniability.
It is more horrifying to me that you cannot all be explained away as yahoos and rednecks, because I’ve found some of you to be intelligent and coherent, and I’m sure most of you are not racists.
But you voted for one.
Plausible deniability
I am sure most of you would never subject wives, sisters, aunts, mothers to breast and pussy grabbing.
But you voted for one who does.
Plausible deniability
I am sure you would never attempt to delegitimize, solely because of his race, an elected President by questioning his citizenship.
But you voted for one who did.
Plausible deniability
You would never mock a handicapped man before a national audience.
But you voted for one who did.
Plausible deniability
Surely you would never approve of a sleazy, foul-mouthed radio host calling your twenty-three-year-old daughter “a piece of ass”.
But you voted for one who did.
As manumission gave rise to the Klan, as the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s gave us George Wallace’s campaign for the White House, the Presidency of a Brown gave us the election of perhaps the most unqualified, ill-tempered, profoundly, fundamentally flawed candidate in the history of The Union; one claiming he knows more than the Generals, that he, and he alone could solve our problems.
Don’t you know how transparent your condescension, contempt and dissembling are, and have always been? How, while you look through us, we see through you?
And now you’ve elected this man.
Your deniability is no longer plausible.
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