Prometheus 6

Jeff Jacoby said

White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.

He should be forced to read “Do you understand where you are?” aloud immediately on waking and just before going to bed for three days.

This quote is insufficient. In fact, don't even read it here. Go read it all at Group News Blog.

LATER: Changed my mind. It's long, and I don't want you to miss the part that struck me.

And then I saw them. The town's White folks. scattered to and fro. On their front steps...leaning casually against mailboxes...some just peering over the roofs of their cars, resting heads in propped hands. Casual as can be. They knew what had gone down the night before. I remember seeing one old guy just chuckle as he walked up his driveway to his side door. We were crazed, and these folks had an eerie, “What? You don't get it?” calm to 'em as they watched us fume and spit.

About a half hour later, a large family meeting was called in the high school's lunchroom (a family friend was of course, the school's custodian, and had access). Spleens were to say the least, seriously vented.

“We can't tolerate this!”

“This ain't 1920! What are we gonna do about this?”

“Fuck this!” (much grumbling and “Heys!” from the crowd) “Sorry. Sorry about my language. But, this is 1993! How does something like this happen?”

And then my Uncle R. The supposedly “crazy” Uncle R. (mentioned in comments in Jesse's “Genius” post) stood up, towering in his crisp overalls and bright red work shirt—and brought his frying pan-sized hand down suddenly on a table, and it boomed like a grenade in the lunchroom, stopping us all dead in our tracks.

He thundered, “Ya'll have no clue do you? No clue at all! I read the papers—I hear about what goes on up north. Cops shootin' you down every God-blessed day, but that's okay! That's fine! And then you all come down here, thinkin' everything is fine and mellow. You haven't a care in the world. And you leave your brains at home and forget the simplest things. Do you have the common sense that God gave a gnat? Do you understand where-you-are?”

The room fell silent. He looked around at the assembled and repeated it.

“Do you understand...where-you-are?” He took a breath. “Where we are?”

We all knew what he meant. That where we all had come from—those four corners of the world were not much different. That we had our own silent codes we had to live under. And that in our descending on Tiny Town, N.C., we had forgotten about that place's awful, and indelible codes and behavior because of race. How in this day and age, flouting those codes was still in many ways a potentially dangerous thing. And that we needed to realize that.