Reply #6: But best of all, I loved how that journalist just lied through her fucking teeth. [View All]

  I grew up with a lot of racism around me and it just never "set" well with me. To this day, and maybe I can't articulate it as well as I should, I don't really have it in me to hate ignorant racists who are open about it. Because they're so goddamned ignorant, they don't know to hide it; how offensive and damnable it is.

  You know there are some people who live in towns their whole lives and the population of that town might be double what your supermarket is during a busy spell. Their whole lives.

  It doesn't mean that their racism is any less wrong or less dangerous. I just don't have it in my heart to hate them. They don't, in some primitive sense, get what's wrong about it.

  BUT...

  There's the fuckers who swear up and down all day that they never witness racism, like this reporter did, or that the topic of nigras never comes up around the dinner table- and they fly the confederate flag, usually above their state flag, outside. Those are vipers in the grass and as far as I'm concerned if something bad happened to them, there's a shitload of Indian kids and baby seals and spotted owls ahead of them in my "List of things to take pity on."

  By the way, if any of you are familiar with Malcolm X and his career and how his opinions of whites changed with exposure, there is an analog here: At the beginning of his career he was very anti-White, called caucasions "The White Devil". Because he didn't know better. Part of the Nation of Islam was this teaching and it included that no white could ever belong to Islam.

  So years later, Malcolm X makes the Haj and, of course, sees whites, blacks, and every color in-between making the pilgrimage and worshipping at Mecca. It caused a paradigm shift in his thinking. He...like the "ignorant" whites I speak of above...were/are a victim of ignorance.

  He came back from the trip and made changes based on these experiences which dropped all that "White Devil" bullshit. And the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Mohammed (sp?) eventually had him gunned down for it, in front of his kids.

  There is a difference, I think, to why some turn to racism. Some don't know any better, don't have any experiences which would support a "wider" world view.

  And there are others who should know better, do know better, but choose that evil.

  In my heart I judge them differently. The ignorant can be taught, exposed to a bigger, more inclusive world. Those that choose this evil are beyond salvation of any sort and deserve calamity in this life and, God willing, the next.

PB