Tag Archives: Racism

In the Wake of Systemic Failure, Stop Demanding Perfect Civility

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George Floyd died with a white cop’s knee on his neck, just as Eric Garner died with a white cop’s arm around his throat, just as lives of color have been snuffed out since long before America was even America. For over four hundred years on this continent alone, people of color have been enslaved, dehumanized, exploited, marginalized, tortured, lampooned, and dismissed, yet White America still expects people of color to react with civility—this despite the recent, overwhelmingly white protests in favor of “re-opening the country.” Look at those pictures of heavily armed white men screaming in the face of police and medical personnel, all because they can’t go to their favorite bar or get a pedicure, and an honest mind would have to wonder what America would look like if these apoplectic citizens had come from a four-centuries-long history in which their ancestors, friends, and relatives were murdered, raped, and denied human rights.

“Two wrongs do not make a right,” some have said in the wake of the violence in Minneapolis, as they also said after Ferguson, and Los Angeles, and Detroit, and Watts, and on and on, proving that small minds default to clichés when real arguments fail. No, I suppose two wrongs don’t make anything right, but neither does faux outrage. Plus, if you suggest that there is anything systemically cancerous in America, this “outrage” turns to defensiveness. If you are willing to concede the immorality of Derek Chauvin’s actions without a concurrent inclination to change the system that produced him, you are still part of the problem, for it is the American system that cries out for change.

Perhaps start with yourself. If you constantly feel the need to defend the white supremacist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy, ask yourself why that is. Then ask how your indignance over others’ protests fit, or fail to, with the values you claim to embrace.

“What good does it do to burn down businesses and police stations, especially in your own neighborhoods?” some people ask. First of all, that “your own neighborhoods” is usually code for “the places in which we allow you to exist, separate and unequal.” How many of us would feel lasting affection for our prison?

Second, when the system constantly fails and those who benefit from the system offer, at best, hollow words of solidarity without concurrent action, it is not the fault of the system’s victims.

Third, such a question assumes that humans always respond to horror, pain, and frustration with pure logic. Think again about those pictures you’ve seen of heavily armed white people screaming in the face of the authorities and medical responders. Remember that those pictures were taken only a couple of months after a blanket stay-at-home order whose purpose is to stop a pandemic, that most of the people in those pictures have only been inconvenienced, not oppressed. Try to empathize with those who come from a long history of real oppression—slavery, the destruction of families, armed and organized denial of constitutional rights, and on and on. How can we expect civil and logical responses to incivility and illogic, especially when it all happens over and over again?

America always demands that oppressed peoples react humbly and peacefully, no matter how repugnant the offense. And yet no civil protest is good enough, either. Ask Colin Kaepernick what happened to his NFL career after a peaceful protest. Ask Black Lives Matter participants who were demonized as racist for their temerity in peacefully protesting systemic racism. Think of assassinated black leaders, raped black women, murdered black children. At what point would you dismiss logic as a productive response? When would you abandon hope in “working within the law”? What would you do to change the world for your children in ways it wasn’t changed for you? What, in your mind, is the proper response to four hundred years of having a knee on your neck and your so-called allies’ “outrage,” in the wake of which nothing substantive changes?

Americans like to tell ourselves that we are the greatest nation on earth, in human history, but we are seldom honest with ourselves about the rot creeping through the heart of our mythos. We cannot be the land of equal opportunity for all people and also maintain our ambivalence over institutional inequality, which installs a hard ceiling on how so many of us can live our lives and all too often kills us. We are hundreds of years overdue for an accounting. And if that accounting is not civil, if it becomes violent, we shouldn’t wonder why. We’ve had plenty of chances to do things differently.

John F. Kennedy once warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” What have we actually done to encourage peaceful revolution—or, better yet, to eliminate the need for revolution at all? Americans should ponder that question before villainizing those who have already suffered so much.

Kingdoms and Bridges: Online Communication, Activism, and the Price of Conscience

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NOTE: I wrote this two or three years ago, sent it off to a handful of places with no success, and then forgot about it. I post it here as a freebie to revisit a time not so long ago when I still felt hopeful we could talk to each other.

When I was in fourth grade, my family moved from small-town Arkansas to an even tinier Mississippi hamlet with limited educational opportunities: an all-white, K-12 private “academy” and a public school with a mostly African-American student body. In Arkansas, itself no bastion of racial equality, I attended integrated public schools. In Mississippi, my parents, not wishing me to be both the new kid and the different one, enrolled me in the private academy. When my peers referred to the “the nigger school,” even during class, it shocked me. Introverted and confused, I had no idea how to navigate a school full of strangers except to do what they did and talk like they talked. So, even though I had begun to question the logic and morality of racism, I, too, used racist language, to my everlasting shame.

My best friend’s name was not Joe, but that’s what I’ll call him. On my first day in that academy, I stood alone. Since most of the kids came from lower-middle-class or impoverished backgrounds and everyone was white, there were few cliques, but these kids knew each other and had formed patterns of behavior of which I was not a part. As they scampered off for their usual recess activities, they did not think to ask me along, and as an introvert, I did not assert myself. Instead, I just walked around, daydreaming and kicking rocks in the gravel driveway. Spotting me, Joe approached and introduced himself. We talked. He suggested that we hang out after school. In short, he performed an act of kindness and empathy: he noticed me and reached out. Soon, he became my best friend. Though we lost touch after I moved away, we found each other through social media in the mid-2000s. We still loved each other like brothers. We could talk about anything.

Politically, I’m a leftist. Joe leans to the right. He provided a dissenting but reasonable voice to some of my farther-left positions, and I suggested new ways for him to interpret situations. Sometimes, we even changed each other’s minds.

In my remembrance, our relationship’s degeneration began with debates over guns. Given the incredible statistics about gun violence, weapons’ ubiquity, and many other factors, I have long believed that this country needs to revise its stance on firearms and its unsophisticated readings of the Second Amendment. I have never claimed that new gun laws alone would solve gun violence. In fact, I have always argued for a multifaceted solution that includes regulation, new law-enforcement methods, destigmatization of and accessible treatments for mental illness, a reassessment of violence as a solution to our problems, and more. In short, I have rejected the idea that we can do nothing about our gun problem, but I have also rejected overly simplistic solutions.

On social media, though, far too many people insist we do nothing. “We cannot limit our access to weapons because of the Second Amendment,” they say, ignoring how we have already limited our access in common-sense ways. You can’t just run down to Wal-Mart and buy weapons-grade plutonium or a surface-to-air missile or a LAW rocket. “Laws won’t completely stop gun violence, so we shouldn’t have any laws,” people say, ignoring logic. As others have pointed out, why have any laws if that’s true? Why have traffic laws when people run red lights and speed and pass against the yellow line anyway? It only stops good guys with cars from getting to work on time. Why outlaw heroin and cocaine when people get high anyway? It only stops good guys from getting high responsibly. Why make murder illegal? It just keeps the good guys from killing bad guys. And so on. Of course, no one wants a meth lab next door or a lunatic driving one hundred miles an hour through their residential neighborhood, but some people believe that guns exist in a sociopolitical and moral vacuum in which normal logic does not apply.

I had these conversations a thousand times on social media—the same people making the same points and counterpoints over and over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. If I suggested that maybe, just maybe, in the wake of Mass Shooting #3,824, we should finally try something, the exact same conversations ensued, often with the exact same people. I would also have to hear the same evidence, often quoted out of context. Chicago is still violent! (As if its violence or lack thereof is directly attributable only to its gun laws.) “Good guys with guns can prevent violence. I know because I heard about somebody who managed to do it.” (No one has yet explained how anecdotal evidence is applicable to the entire nation and all the possible conditions under which violence might occur, to say nothing of the questions raised by the whole “good guys with guns” concept. Who decides what constitutes a good guy or a bad guy? Is it always obvious? If two good guys with guns arrive to stop a mass shooter, how do they recognize each other—a secret password? A handshake? If a good guy with a gun shoots at a bad guy and hits a bystander or another good guy, does that now make the good guy a bad guy? And on and on.) Once you’ve covered all this dozens of times with people who never listen, trying to respect their positions and their rights when they don’t respect yours, you become weary. And so I instituted a new rule for my own social media feeds: I would no longer have these conversations. I would no longer debate whether we have a gun violence problem or talk about these same points. I would only discuss and debate methods to fix the problem. People could still have those same conversations on their own Facebook walls or Twitter accounts if they wished, but I would not participate, and I would delete the posts of anyone who tried to hijack our discussion of solutions.

At first, Joe resisted this idea. He once told me that if I only wanted to talk with progressives who agreed with me, I should not make my posts public, as if making them public meant that I owed the whole world those same useless conversations. I don’t. I was not and am not interested in living in an echo chamber, but I can no longer waste time with repetition while people are dying. Eventually, Joe respected my decision, but that conflict cracked the foundation of our lifelong friendship, even though I never advocated a solution that would affect him or his gun ownership in any substantive way.

As the years passed and Joe drifted further to the political right, we disagreed on more topics, but again, our conversations were mostly productive. Joe refused to acknowledge his privilege as a straight white Christian able-bodied male who lived above the poverty line, but overall, he listened to me, and I listened to him.

With time, though, nearly every interaction turned into a political argument. In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shootings, I shared a Facebook meme in which the writer argued that politicians, especially conservatives, should stop sending us their thoughts and prayers and actually do something. This meme pointed out that LGBTQ people suffer harassment, abuse, marginalization, torture, and worse every day. And it’s true. Anti-LGBTQ legislation contributes to an atmosphere in which treating non-hetero, gender-nonconforming people as subhuman becomes acceptable. So-called Christian politicians attack LGBTQ people as abominations, quoting the usual out-of-context and/or ahistorical Bible verses, which makes it a little more okay for bigots to reject and attack difference. The Orlando massacre highlighted all this. Florida’s own governor said that all we can do is pray. Well, no, we could actually try to fix these problems. We could do something, try anything and see how it worked, rather than shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Huh. Who could have seen that coming?”

When I shared the meme, Joe jumped on me with both feet, arguing that only a victim or a victim’s friends and family had any right to reject politicians’ lip-service “solutions.” I don’t pretend to understand Joe’s reasoning, but I pointed out that anyone can speak out against injustice, hatred, and inaction. I argued that the writer was correct in saying that individual hate crimes happen every day in America and that much of our rhetoric and politics actually encourage such events. For the meme’s author—for me, and millions of others—the Orlando tragedy was not an abstract, distant event. it was one more link in a long historical chain. It was not a matter of politics or culture wars. It was a matter of survival. In terms of our personal relationship, Joe and I could find little common ground in our positions.

Arguments about race finally fractured our friendship. Heated debates happened every time a white police officer killed an unarmed black person or people of color protested racist actions. To be fair, Joe clarified that he does not hate people of color and finds obvious acts of racism as repugnant as everyone else. When Eric Garner died on a New York City sidewalk, rasping “I can’t breathe” while caught in a white officer’s chokehold, Joe condemned the officer’s actions.

Whenever events seemed more ambiguous, though, or conflicting evidence surfaced, Joe tended to side with white people. He insisted that Mike Brown was guilty and Darren Wilson innocent. While this conclusion is hardly uncommon, Joe’s vehement rejection of racism’s possible role in Brown’s death and Wilson’s fear bothered me—as did Joe’s refusal to acknowledge our own privilege in debating racism as a theoretical possibility instead of a concrete, everyday reality. Given the history of Ferguson, Missouri, and America in general; the institutional racism and ethnocentrism that European settlers brought to North America and perpetuated through chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynch culture, and a thousand other manifestations; and the fact that Darren Wilson represented a traditionally white supremacist authority during a time of increasing police militarization, it seems all but certain that race played some role in Brown’s death, even if Darren Wilson himself never had a conscious racist thought in his life. Institutional racism tends to ingrain in white people a fear of color, particularly blackness. Too many people respond to fear with violence, and if those people are white, our system tends to exonerate them, as it did Wilson. At the time, I argued that racism is so deeply entrenched in the American psyche that it almost certainly contributed to the conflict between Mike Brown and the police and to Brown’s death at their hands.

This is a complex position that asks us to shine a harsh, introspective light on our nation and its myths. It requires us to remember that people seldom, if ever, make decisions in moral/ethical/sociohistorical vacuums. It reminds us that we must treat the disease, not just the symptoms. This is not to say that the position is perfect or always true, but its premise of complexity encourages deeper thought and intricate, tough solutions.

In this instance, though, Joe was more comfortable painting Mike Brown as a questionable character who should have complied with authority. I found this position too simple.

Then there was the response from Ferguson’s enraged citizenry. So much of the country condemned their actions as mindless rioting perpetrated by thugs. To me, it seems much more likely that the post-trial violence represented an emotional breaking point for marginalized and persecuted people. I do not condone violence as a solution, but I can understand the appeal of violence as a response to generations of oppression and anger and frustration and fear. In the wake of Ferguson, I found myself in several arguments wherein some people wanted to dismiss the town’s citizens’ concerns and their life experiences. Some even demanded that we never criticize the police and always comply with them, no matter what. A truly puzzling aspect to these arguments: the people making them also often insisted that we need an unlimited arsenal of automatic weapons to resist the tyranny of the very government that the police represent. But recognizing this contradiction would require introspection. Thus, many people on social media defaulted to arguments about nonwhite bogeymen from whom we (whoever “we” are) must defend ourselves and our property.

For Joe, Black Lives Matter particularly struck a nerve. He believed that Black Lives Matter is responsible for an atmosphere of hatred that led to events like the murder of Dallas police officers. This conclusion seems akin to blaming the French Resistance for World War II. Several times, I pointed out that Black Lives Matter is not about hating white people or trying to hurt/abuse/oppress white folks. It is about calling attention to violence against black people and peacefully trying to stop it. I pointed out that BLM has disseminated a manifesto, which does not call for violence or Othering white people. I pointed out that, in Dallas, the police and the peaceful protestors coexisted well, even posed for pictures together, before one very troubled person murdered people from ambush. I pointed out that Black Lives Matter spokespeople condemned these killings. I pointed out that the killer had perverted the aims and methods of BLM.

Whenever I posted about issues like this, Joe argued every point, never considering any possibility other than the ones he had already accepted as fact. He conflated a group responding to hatred with groups that act hatefully. My wife and friends privately expressed concern and wondered why I endured an alleged troll. I answered that we were like brothers, that I loved Joe, that I was willing to listen even when I disagreed, that I need people like him in my life to make me question my own beliefs and assumptions. It is also worth repeating that he is, in his own way, forward-thinking on many issues. He is not some back-to-1800 knuckle-dragger.

None of that made it any easier for other people who love me to tolerate his barrage of aggressive rhetoric, though.

Once, I shared an article about a burglary victim in Oklahoma who hung from a tree on his property several nooses and a sign suggesting that would-be thieves should not linger after dark. The sight of this display upset many locals. According to the article, the man removed the sign after he realized that people found it racist.

I commented that this situation demonstrated one more reason why we have to keep fighting racism and privilege rather than shutting down conversations about them, the latter strategy being one that Joe had advocated in a previous exchange. Joe made the first comment on the thread, simply asking how this situation related to racism. I responded that nooses hanging from trees evoked the long and brutal history of lynching, not frontier justice, which no longer exists and always seemed problematic anyway. Such an evocation causes real pain for people whose family members suffered such a horrible fate. Moreover, the sign echoed the history of “sundown towns,” in which nonwhite peoples were warned not to be caught inside the city limits after dark. These evocations and the resulting pain and anguish further diminish the ability of nonwhite people to live full, happy lives. I also suggested that the Oklahoman’s ignorance of all this history might have sprung directly from shutting down conversations about race, meaning that he was, in his own way, a victim.

A few nitwits ignored the complexities of this position and posted racist responses. I refuted their arguments and then banned them from my page, since I didn’t know them or how they found my wall in the first place. I am uninterested in debating entrenched bigots, especially ones I don’t know. Joe posted several times, mostly about how nooses don’t signify lynching to him (an idea I attributed to his white privilege) and how Black Lives Matter was guilty of far worse offenses. At this point, some of my other friends got involved. One investigated Joe’s wall, found some anti-BLM posts, and called Joe a racist. Others groaned at his not-uncommon belief that progressive open-mindedness means we have to respect to every idea, no matter how dangerous or offensive. My wife even responded, which she had resisted for a long time, mostly to point out Joe’s use of unintentionally belittling language when speaking to one of my female friends.

When Joe replied, my wife told him not to mention her name again. Rightly or wrongly, she was fed up. Joe responded aggressively.

After that, we fed off of each other’s anger. We were both at fault. I said things I shouldn’t have said. Unable to understand his own role in my wife’s attitude and seemingly shocked that I would defend her, Joe unfriended me.

We have since reconciled to a certain extent. We are no longer friends on social media, but we have exchanged private messages that re-established our affection. I still love him like a brother, and when my wife experienced a serious health problem, he reached out with well-wishes and prayers. He is a good man, no more flawed than most of us.

Still, our conflict made me think about the costs of activism.

When I speak out online, I risk the wrath of trolls who will dog my every word with illogical, offensive, angry diatribes. I also risk being misunderstood. If I do not communicate an exact, unambiguous meaning and cover every possible counter-thought in a single Tweet, I can expect a deluge of missives from the human equivalent of rabid wolves. They snarl and bark and bite, driven by motives at which we can only guess.

When I participate in rallies or marches or protests or Pride Parades, I risk violence—verbal abuse, terroristic threats, Photoshopped pictures that ridicule or mislead, thrown objects, fisticuffs, knives and bullets and bombs.

When I advocate for causes and beliefs that do not match those of my family and friends, I risk censure, angry lectures, calls for me to fall in line. Several people have disappeared from my life because they disagreed with me, even if my advocacy and my causes/beliefs do not directly connect to them.

Yet when I do nothing, I risk losing my self-respect. When I abandon those in need, I do not just ignore their problems; I contribute. When I remain silent, I consent to the status quo and disconnect myself from the world spirit that should unite us all.

I am no saint. I do not hold the moral high ground over anyone but the worst of humanity. I do not consider my positions to be correct because they are mine. Rather, I adopt the positions that seem right, independent of my first reactions, and I am willing to alter my positions based on new evidence. I try to champion causes that will make America what it has always claimed to be and never yet has been—a land of true equality and love and peace, the city on a hill. In serving my conscience and my ethics, I can live with the verbal abuse and the threats of violence. I can give as good as I get, and I deal with trolls and social terrorists in much the same way I deal with political and religious ones. I say that you can harass me and even kill me, but you cannot make me afraid. You cannot stop me from trying to live a life of truth and integrity.

I wonder, though, how America has come to this point, where we have to choose between our beliefs and the people with whom we have shared our lives. When did our default mode of discourse become antagonistic and spiteful? When did our lives become an Internet article’s comments section? We lament similar attitudes and actions in our politicians, yet we build ever-higher walls around ourselves every day.

The idea that social media may isolate us as much as connect us is not new, nor is the conception that these media can be used as tools for bullying, domination, unprecedented hostility. What seems newer, in method and severity, is how social media and their instant call-and-response discourse can kill long-time, otherwise solid relationships. All of us, including me, can and should do better. If we cannot communicate civilly with our loved ones, how much chance do we have of reaching strangers? We have to find a way to share our differences, listen to each other, learn, and act without surrendering to the vagaries of our worst selves. Our choices should not be limited to silent and oppressive consent or isolation. Otherwise, social media, the connections they make possible, and even activism itself are threatened as we shout at each other across the borders of what David Foster Wallace once called “our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”

One answer, I believe, is empathy—the simple ability to see a situation from another’s perspective, to understand how they feel, to realize that we don’t know the specific circumstances of their lives and have not experienced their pain, to get out of our own heads and see the world in fresh ways. Through blind certainty and obstinacy, we break our connections and shrink the world. Through empathy, we build bridges to new possibilities.

The world needs fewer kingdoms and more bridges. We can build the latter one word at a time.

Email me: officialbrettriley@gmail.com

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New Short Story

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Check out my latest published short story, “Far Away from the Path and a Little Bit Lost,” on Ghost Town. It’s a contemporary re imagining of “Red Riding Hood” set in post-Katrina New Orleans’s 8th Ward.

Blood Not-So-Simple: THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI Review

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In the first act of Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, a woman marches into the local advertising office and pays five thousand dollars to rent three derelict billboards located on a seldom-traveled rural road. That woman is Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), and from the first words she speaks, from her hard facial expression, from her indomitable body language, the viewer—and the poor ad agent—understand that you mess with Mildred at your peril.

These billboards, set at perhaps fifty-yard intervals, catalyze a communal crisis that involves Mildred, her son, her friends, the local police, the advertisers, and one dentist who picks exactly the wrong time to take a political side. Mildred has the billboards painted red and sequentially messaged:

Raped While Dying

And Still No Arrests

How Come, Chief Willoughby?

These messages represent Mildred’s shot across the bow of the local constabulary, led by William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). We soon learn that Mildred’s daughter was raped and murdered, her body set afire, months before. The police have no leads. And Mildred has waited long enough.

Though you might think a small conservative town would rally behind the victim’s family, much of their loyalty to their fellow citizen ends where their adoration for Chief Willoughby begins. Mildred learns this almost immediately when Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell, who, like most actors in this film, disappears into his role so well you forget whom you’re watching) spots the billboards and reports them to Willoughby (yet another excellent Harrelson character). This leads to a talk between Willoughby and Mildred, in which the complicated nature of the film is epitomized:

Willoughby: I’d do anything to catch the guy who did it, Mrs. Hayes, but when the DNA don’t match no one who’s ever been arrested, and when the DNA don’t match any other crime nationwide, and there wasn’t a single eyewitness from the time she left your house to the time we found her, well… right now there ain’t too much more we could do.

Mildred: You could pull blood from every man and boy in this town over the age of 8.

Willoughby: There’s civil rights laws prevents that, Mrs. Hayes, and what if he was just passing through town?

Mildred: Pull blood from every man in the country.

Willoughby: And what if he was just passing through the country?

Mildred: If it was me, I’d start up a database, every male baby was born, stick ’em on it, and as soon as he done something wrong, cross reference it, make 100% certain it was a correct match, then kill him.

Willoughby: Yeah well, there’s definitely civil rights laws that prevents that. (This quote courtesy of IMDB.com)

From this exchange, we can see that Willoughby is less a bad man than a flawed human being. We can never forget those flaws, but we can acknowledge his empathy and the real problems law enforcement faces in cases without leads. From the same scene:

Willoughby: I don’t think them billboards is very fair.

Mildred: The time it took you to get out here whining like a bitch, Willoughby, some other poor girl’s probably out there being butchered.

The brutal rape, murder, and desecration of Mildred’s daughter has hardened her past the point of empathy with Willoughby’s problems, including his slow and agonizing death from pancreatic cancer—though there is a later scene in the police station that suggests that isn’t quite true, either. In short, from the opening moments of the film, we realize that we have entered a complicated world, where those who deserve our sympathy don’t always get it and no one is clearly and purely good or bad.

Chief Willoughby, whom, we might assume, is the antagonist—and who is capable of saying things like, “If you fired every cop who was just a little bit racist, you’d have, like, three cops. And they’d hate the fags”; who is capable of strong-arming the mother of a rape/murder victim; who continues to employ Dixon in spite of rumors about his torturing black suspects—is also a self-sacrificing man who can see the smallest, dimmest spark of humanity in a goon like Dixon and the likely outcomes of his disease for his loved ones. A series of letters he writes to the other characters reveals further depths in this man, who, against your better judgment, you may come to love a little.

Mildred, so strong and so broken, backtracks and shows honest concern over Willoughby’s health just before she commits an act of protest that may well shock you. In many ways—hence this review’s title—she is like her own character from Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, Blood Simple, moved to a new town and sick of men’s bullshit. If McDormand is not nominated for Best Actress, I shall cry foul.

Dixon, at first a cartoonish buffoon who embodies the worst characteristics of southern white men and police officers, reveals layers of compassion and dedication underneath those borderline-inhuman traits.

In short, the film never lets us settle comfortably into rooting for any one character, and it forces us to see all sides of a complex, maddening, tragic situation. There is nothing wrong with a good guys vs. bad guys tale, but Three Billboards’ story is one we could imagine occurring in a thousand small towns anywhere in America. That universality and the depth of the movie’s character development make this story impossible to forget.

Plus, for a narrative that hinges on racism, sexism, rape, murder, Missouri citizens versus the police, terminal illness, suicides, severe injuries, and familial strife, Three Billboards is often surprisingly and refreshingly funny. At times, you may laugh and cry after one scene.

Supporting characters, played by always-welcome film and television veterans like Zeljko Ivanek and Clarke Peters, play key roles. Caleb Landry Jones’s advertising man is the hinge on which key plot points turn. Peters, playing a black officer who sweeps in and takes over a station with a history of racial problems, brings his typical no-nonsense gravitas to a minor character, as well as a few key lines that remind us of the stakes: looking about at the all-white force in the station, he says, “Ain’t y’all cracker motherfuckers got work to do?”

Some viewers might not appreciate the film’s non-resolution resolution, but for this writer, it perfectly encapsulates the world of Ebbing, Missouri, which, in its turn, perfectly encapsulates so much of American life in the 21st Century—questions without clear answers, strife on intersectional levels without clear solutions, individual pain rippling through a community and vice versa.

Underrated director Martin McDonagh and his stellar cast and crew have crafted one of 2017’s best films. If you missed it in theaters, rent it as soon as you can.

A-

Mother of Exiles

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**NOTE** I wrote this approximately one year ago. I sent it out to two or three of the usual MSM outlets, where it was summarily ignored, and then moved on to other writings. I figured it would just go in my metaphorical trunk, where half-finished and unpublished manuscripts sleep in silence. In the wake of today’s Supreme Court ruling upholding one of Trump’s travel bans, though, I thought I’d post it here, in its original form (I’m not even sure the original links work). Perhaps there is relevance here; perhaps not. Make of it what you will.

***

As the Predator-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, took the oath of office, whitehouse.gov pages for climate change, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, and civil rights vanished, as did Spanish-language content. In the coming weeks and months, Americans of conscience will resist any attempt to roll back or eliminate laws and rights that protect all people, not just the members of the white rich nativist conservative (allegedly) Christian ableist heteropatriarchy. Others will uncritically accept the Predator’s vision.

Recently, one of my old friends, caught in the grip of a patriotism that seemed closer to jingoism or nationalism, conflated my anti-Trump stance with anti-Americanism. This is, of course, an old argument, and a highly problematic one, as measured, thoughtful, researched criticism of one’s nation is much more patriotic than blind devotion. I refused to recount all my reasons and evidence for resisting the Predator’s positions and values—reasons and evidence that I have stated and defended for the better part of two years—but I did summarize a few of the positions that I find unconscionable, including his characterizations of the Mexican people.

“He didn’t call all Mexicans rapists and murderers,” said my friend. “Show me where he did that.”

“Look at his speeches,” I said, “and do your own research, from multiple sources.”

It’s true that Trump did not characterize every Mexican immigrant as a rapist or murderer. But it’s also true that he purposefully, strategically downplayed their humanity. His racist and distorted attacks on Mexicans, and Hispanic people in general, outweigh his disingenuous praise. Parsing all of these comments would take more time and space than I have available here, but an examination of the Predator’s inflammatory comment about rapists and murderers might be useful, especially when juxtaposed with self-serving, thinly veiled advertisements for his own products.

Back in June of 2015, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Like George W. Bush before him, the Predator-in-Chief lacks linguistic sophistication. His use of “bigly” still staggers me. In the above quote, “they’re” is confusing. At first, “they” refers to Mexico, a place—an “it,” or, if you accept traditional gender assignations of objects and places, a “she.” Later, though, “they” refers to immigrants. Sometimes, he uses both in the same sentence; they send people with problems, and they bring those problems to us. Trump seems to conflate the entire country of Mexico with “people that have lots of problems,” and those same people are next characterized as drug-runners and/or mules, criminals, and rapists. He uses Othering language, establishing a victimized us and an evil, corrupt them.

To some people, that might seem like splitting a grammatical hair, so let’s look at his presentation of these ideas.

The quote begins with the idea that Mexico “sends” people across the border, as if the land has a mind of its own and wants to stick it to Americans. This anthropomorphic characterization of a geographical locale seems nonsensical unless Trump is speaking of the Mexican government, which would suggest a series of offices where mustache-twirling bureaucrats interview citizens and assign “bad hombres” to cross the border en masse. Nothing is impossible, I suppose, but one would think such an organized and wide-ranging assault on American stability from a border country might attract the intelligence community’s attention.

Next, look at how Trump organizes his ideas—the generalized “people that have lots of problems,” followed by a general list of what those problems allegedly are, drugs and rape and the much vaguer “crime,” which could mean anything. He states all of this as if it were fact, and he provides no specific support for his assertions. Like so many things he says, he wants us to believe these statements are true because he made them. Only after he spends five sentences denouncing immigrants from Mexico does he tack on the qualification, which is notable not only for its lack of development but for his admitting that their goodness is hypothetical. Trump seems to be saying, “Factually, immigrant criminals rape and run drugs, but because I am so magnanimous, I am willing to assume that some of them don’t.” Gosh, isn’t he nice?

In short, Trump did not say that all Mexicans are rapists or criminals, but he emphasized criminal traits when describing them, a rhetorical strategy meant to make his audience fear immigrants and support whatever Fascist strategy might keep them out or deport them. Even his “I love Hispanics” taco-bowl tweet, so ridiculous and self-aggrandizing, reduces an entire culture to servers of food for rich white men.

To combat this influx of marauding chefs, Trump continues to insist on a border wall. What does he plan to do about the existing barriers or the enormous stretches of land along the Rio Grande—drain the river? Which Goldman Sachs executive will get that job?

Trump wants to make Mexico pay for this wall, but he can’t even manage to pay his own contractors. To be fair, he has said that he would be fine with having a big door in that wall for legal immigration, but then why not just embrace President Obama’s call for an easier path to citizenship? How does Trump factor in the ever-expanding Border Patrol, and why doesn’t he mention that illegal border crossings have already been declining for years? (See the “Unauthorized Immigrants” section here.) Why doesn’t he say much more about the good, desperate people who come to America, which still casts itself as the Biblical/Winthropian “city on a hill,” seeking a better life? Has the light of the world burned out?

Why hasn’t he spent much time discussing unauthorized immigration from other countries, across other borders, including victims of sex trafficking? Why the focus on Mexico, Hispanics, “bad hombres”?

Something is going on here beyond a concern for national security or economics—perhaps blatant racism or a cynical appeal to his base’s xenophobia.

In any case, as of this writing, whitehouse.gov’s new, and rather spare, “Issues” page lists nothing about immigration reform. Instead, the Predator-in-Chief has given us something called (rather problematically, from a grammar perspective) an “America First Foreign Policy.” It’s a blustery statement, vaguely threatening to nations that have the temerity to put their own concerns above America’s. You can read Trump’s pre-election positions on immigration here. As for details about the wall, or immigrants who have lived in America most of their lives without citizenship, well, it’s all anybody’s guess. We can, however, glean more about his conscience, or lack thereof, from his recent executive order banning immigrants, especially Muslims, from certain African and Middle Eastern countries. Trump’s abandonment of those in dire need, such as Syrian refugees, and his anti-Hispanic, nationalist, exceptionalist rhetoric echoes Nazi Germany’s demonization of Jews and the contemporaneous call for a national identity predicated, to a great extent, on destroying this Demonic Other.

Near the Statue of Liberty, a plaque bears Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, “The New Colossus.” This sonnet names America the “Mother of Exiles.” Though this romanticized view of the country glosses over our blood-soaked bedrock of Native American genocide and displacement, we cannot ignore that, even before its Declaration of Independence, America as a nation has always consisted of immigrants and their descendants. Yet the Predator-in-Chief rejects our national valuation of embracing those in need. He uses language and imagery that dehumanize the desperate and the destitute. He wants to turn off the lamp and shut the golden door.

We all need to ask ourselves if we can live with that.

The 24-Hour News Cycle–a Rant #nonfiction #news #rants

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The 24-Hour News Cycle: In My Opinion, This Sucks

                **Disclaimers** For fans of my series on aging (both of you), I’ll be getting back to it as soon as other things stop pissing me off. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what I’m doing. I’d also like to say that I’m aware that “media” is a plural noun. In the essay below, though, I refer to it as a singular, monolithic entity—not because I believe that’s an accurate description, but because the people I’m writing about seem to—and thus use singular verbs and pronouns in conjunction with the noun itself.

                Today while channel-surfing, my wife Kalene flipped past one of the 24-hour news network—Headline News, I think. And not two seconds passed before we heard the first mention of Warren Jeffs, the polygamist leader whose trial starts soon. As the anchor of the moment promised more on the story after the break, I could hear, somewhere in America, Casey Anthony breathing a sigh of relief. As Jon Stewart once said, all the networks need to change their focus is to stumble across something shiny. Get past the exhaustive coverage of one major scandal and you’ll probably find the next one lined up, ready to worm its way into the national consciousness with the help, even the prodding, of the “news” channels.

                Normally, when anyone from the average lay person to the richest celebrity wants to complain about the problems in their lives, the media becomes their go-to scapegoat. I have little patience for that kind of oversimplification. Hey, famous douchebag who cheated on your spouse in public, the people reporting what you did aren’t “haters” or cogs in a media conspiracy to ruin your life. If you don’t want to see your picture on all the news channels and every tabloid from here to Mars, don’t cheat on your spouse, or at least have the good sense to be discreet.

                During the George W. Bush administration, the President and pretty much every Republican on Earth complained about the so-called “liberal media” every time someone reported that anything might be wrong with the country or its methods. As a liberal, I’m still waiting to discover this mainstream “liberal media.” The Nation is liberal. Mother Jones is liberal. CNN? No. Their neglecting to proselytize from a far-right stance does not make them liberal by default; it just makes them not Fox News. I always wondered how the right could complain, considering the media utterly failed for at least six years to do any investigative reporting on pretty much every questionable, unconstitutional move the administration made. Back to Jon Stewart, he and his staff once said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “How can the news channels ask whether the President did a good job making his case?” when they should have been asking, “Was he ever telling the truth?” Mainstream outlets almost never called the administration on their excesses until Bush was headed for lame duck status and even Republican politicians started abandoning his ship, even as they kept pushing (as they push today) for the perpetuation of his policies.

                Back during the presidential election of 2008, Sarah Palin’s infamous interviews with Katie Couric should have proven to the world, even to John McCain, that Palin was dumb as a stump and willfully ignorant. Instead, McCain helped her blame the media for her inability to answer a basic question like “Which of your running mate’s policies do you agree with?” Mr. Senator and Ms. Ex-Governor, that isn’t “Gotcha Journalism,” whatever that means. It’s an elementary policy question. How can you trust a person with the second-highest office in the land if she doesn’t even know what she claims to represent? The dumbassery was Palin’s fault, not Couric’s or the media’s.

                More recently, when Rachel Maddow delivered an editorial arguing that Fox News could no longer legitimately claim to be a news channel, I had friends who dismissed the argument out of hand before they even heard what she had to say. “It’s just another case of the media’s being out of control,” some of them said, failing to explain how the media could be in a conspiracy against itself. Maddow’s reasoning was that Fox News’ on-air offers to sponsor Tea Party rallies put it in the position of news maker, not news reporter, and that it had abandoned any pretense of its own “fair and balanced” tagline. She had a point. You can bet that if CNN tried to sponsor far-left rallies and report on them in prime time, the right would have a fit. And they’d be, well, right to do so. The news should report, not editorialize or opine or pontificate.

                Leaving the realm of politics, you can’t go ten minutes without hearing some actor or sports star accuse the media of trying to ruin their careers. Does the media too often focus on the sensational, the sordid, and the bloody? Sure it does, and for that we should call it out. But we’ve also got to reserve some of that blame for ourselves. When our comments and our Internet traffic and our TV ratings prove that we’d rather hear about, say, Ben Rothlisberger’s sexual assault cases than Warrick Dunn’s humanitarian work in his hometown, we can’t just blame the media as if it is somehow disconnected from us.

                Some of us even blame the media for things like eating disorders in young women and our youth’s tendency to shoot their classmates when things go badly in their lives. The media may well be part of those problems, but we can’t oversimplify the situation—ignoring issues such as personal responsibility, parental intervention or lack thereof, genetic predisposition, mental and emotional issues, the ridiculous ubiquity of guns—or we’re basically putting a Band-Aid on a car crash victim.

                This complicated relationship between us and the news media often results in our frustration, our anger, our tendency toward violence. Judging from the comments I’ve seen on Facebook and Twitter in the wake of the Anthony trial, I know a lot of people who would happily string up the accused, with or without hard evidence. That bothers me. And in cases like this, I think that the news media is not completely responsible but more culpable than usual. If the so-called “liberal media” had actually been liberal from 2000-2006, we might have avoided morally-murky issues like torture, warrantless wire-tapping, the invasion of Iraq, the dismissal of climate change, the mortgage crisis, No Child Left Behind, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.  How different might history have been if the media had been afraid to go after a sitting president when Watergate happened?

                And if the media had not crucified O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony before their trials even started, forgetting about the whole inconvenient-to-their-narrative “innocent until proven guilty” thing, people might not have been so shocked at the acquittals. Once the media narrative reached its tipping point, the national attitude changed from “Did this person commit this crime?” to “This person committed this crime, so how far should his/her punishment go?”

                If you asked me off the record, I’d admit that I, too, believe that Simpson and Anthony were guilty. But believing something and knowing it are two very different things. In the case of the Anthony trial, I think the prosecution’s major mistake was in pushing for the capital charges instead of the lesser ones in the absence of the so-called “smoking gun.” I’d be willing to bet that most of those jurors believed that Casey Anthony killed her daughter. But when a human being’s life is on the line, belief isn’t enough. You have to know; you have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. As Tim O’Brien says, once a person’s dead, you can’t make them un-dead.

                Of course, no one seemed more shocked and outraged at the verdict than the very talking heads who had long since bypassed due process and had convinced so many of us that Anthony was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps the loudest voice belonged to Nancy Grace, the Yosemite Sam of 24-hour news. She seemed, and remains, apoplectic that the rassen-frassen Tot-mom is walking free. (Incidentally, whenever she repeats that silly name, I want to paraphrase the Rachel McAdams character in Mean Girls. “Nancy, stop trying to make ‘Tot-mom’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”) I also remember flipping channels one day and hearing Jane Valez Mitchell saying, “Right now we’re just speculating, because that’s all we can do.”

                “No,” I shouted, “you could just shut up until you actually have something to report!”

                And therein lies the major problem with the 24-hour networks. In their zeal to cover every tiny facet of the latest sensational trial, they seem to believe that this wide world lacks enough actual news to fill 24 hours of coverage. American secondary education is utterly failing our children. American higher education drifts further and further toward the corporate model, handcuffing teachers and chaining them to the desires, not the needs, of the students; retention becomes the goal, not a pleasant side-effect of a strong university. The food industry keeps trying to poison us while making as much money as possible. Corporate executives keep stuffing their own coffers while screwing over their workers and the American public. Our penal and justice systems continue to demonstrate our nation’s class and racial inequalities. Poor kids of color go missing or get butchered every day, or they just starve to death or overdose because our society glosses over their problems and supports the system we’ve built that perpetuates those problems. And all over the world, people are killing each other, stealing from each other, invading each other’s countries, dying of horrible diseases and fighting those illnesses without funding or help, struggling to survive third-world conditions and natural disasters while we bitch about slow Internet access, and traffic in each other’s bodies and minds.

                Moreover, people everywhere also do great things. Many of us get out and work in underprivileged areas, give to charities, overcome great obstacles, fight racism and classism and sexism and homophobia, research ways to beat disease and famine and inhumanity. Every single day brings an almost limitless array of stories just waiting to be told. You can never convince me that the networks couldn’t fill up 24 hours with material outside the Scandal of the Month.

                So one major problem is that the networks focus on the wrong things. A second one is that most of the airtime is taken up with talking heads who offer not news but opinions and speculations. I have no problem with shows featuring people like Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, though I find that the latter two are cartoon characters who shouldn’t be taken seriously as thinkers. Those people deliver editorials and speculations and opinions, and they make no bones about doing so. But that’s what they’re supposed to do. On the other hand, when I watch network nightly news or an allegedly news-based show on CNN, I don’t want to hear a panel of experts opining about every little nuance of a scandal. I want facts and pictures and statistics. Great TV journalists like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite editorialized, but they saved their editorials for segments dedicated to those kinds of ideas. They didn’t tuck in their chins and puff out their cheeks like bullfrogs and deliver an emotionally-charged frame to every story on the air (I’m looking at you, Mike Galanos).

                When we ignore facts and journalistic objectivity in favor of inflammatory opinion, basic human rights like “innocent until proven guilty” get lost. And when that happens, when we allow a situation where it can happen, we’re all in trouble.

                24-hour news networks need to block out their timeslots, devoting an hour or two to some major news category—American Politics, American Top Stories, International, Finance, Sports, Multicultural Issues, Human Rights at Home and Abroad, and so forth. They need to commit to those blocks, refusing to cut into the scheduled programming unless some major event occurs. And they need a strict definition of “major event,” the kind of thing that once stopped presses and called for extra editions of print newspapers when diverging from the printing schedule cost time and money. Casey Anthony’s lawyer’s leaving the courthouse for lunch or some psychologist’s long-distance speculation about Warren Jeffs doesn’t count.

                In these time blocks, networks need to commit to showing us the full range of news in the world—not just the sensational or the repugnant, but the uplifting and the noble. Not just the upper-class white victims of crime and tragedy but the persons of color, the poor, the LGBT, the non-Christian. Not just the shouted opinions of personalities, but the objective reportings of journalists.

                When I see a documentary like Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman,” or Robert Kenner’s Food Inc., or Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight or Inside Job, or Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side or Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room or Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo, I know that investigative journalism is still possible. When I watch the nightly news on ABC or CBS or NBC, I sometimes find that glimmer of hope that news anchors can still present the story without comment.

                But the 24-hour networks are failing both us and themselves. Just as bad, they are failing their own mandate, which should be a sacred part of the American experience. And when the fourth estate becomes a parody of itself, when Stewart and Colbert become redundant as we point and laugh at the networks, who will remain to deliver the news of journalism’s demise?

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

Things My Childhood Taught Me #nonfiction #rants

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Things My Childhood Taught Me

            DISCLAIMER: This essay probably doesn’t have the kind of purposeful ambiguity that makes for good creative nonfiction writing. It is, in other words, probably a bit too straightforward and preachy. But I feel the need to say it anyway, given recent events. I therefore call it a rant—the first in a series, probably. Thanks for understanding. 

            DISCLAIMER #2: In this writing, I talk about unnamed family members, friends, and acquaintances. The experiences I discuss below are not necessarily indicative of what these people are like in most respects, nor do I claim that they constantly evince the attitudes attributed to them below. I am merely demonstrating how I learned what I learned.

            Recently on Facebook, I found myself in the middle of an argument about abortion. I don’t know how I get into these things. I had linked to a recent article detailing the new Texas law requiring abortion-seeking women to get a sonogram and have a doctor explain its meaning before undergoing any procedure. I see this law, and others like it, as part of the right-wing war on women, the same war that has resulted in other unconscionable laws being proposed and, in some cases, passed. I’m sure there’s another essay or six to be mined from proposals that want to redefine rape for the benefit of men or that, in one case, distinguishes between rape and “forcible rape,” as if any other kind exists. Much of what I’ve seen on this subject seems flat-out insane; even more seems dangerous and regressive.

            The odd part about my posting the article on the Texas law? I did not say one word to defend abortion. I simply asked why, if such a law is going to exist, it doesn’t make a similar requirement of men.  “It takes a man, or at least a man’s sperm, to get pregnant,” I reasoned. Men enjoy the privilege of walking away from a pregnancy if they wish, and their choices to do so—as well as other factors like the mother’s education, her employment situation, the parents’ families’ willingness to help out, and the existence (or lack thereof) of aid programs—affect a woman’s decision to abort or not just as much as her own self-interest or morals. Are there callous women who use abortion over and over as a means of retroactive birth control? Probably, and I admitted as much. But I believe that the majority of women who seek abortions do so for a plethora of reasons, not simply for convenience, and I know for a fact that these women suffer all kinds of consequences for their decisions—emotional, mental, financial, religious, physical, social. My wife Kalene recently read an article in which a doctor stated that 40% of American women have had abortions. I have no idea how accurate that statement is, but in any case, it is dangerous to characterize abortion as an uncommon act perpetrated by a few immoral women who simply don’t want to bother with a baby. Such an attitude encourages us to ignore the very real trauma that leads up to and follows an abortion.  

            The Texas law, and others like it, oversimplifies a complex situation by dumping all responsibility on the woman instead of sharing her burden (or blessing, or responsibility, or whatever you want to call it) with the man, the potential grandparents, or the state. That was my point—not to praise abortion per se, but to support women. Still, the discussion thread that followed sidetracked us all into a discussion of abortion itself—whether it should be legal and why, whether it can ever be considered a moral decision, whether we can understand why some women choose it, who should get to make that choice, and, finally, whether the Bible has anything to say about the situation.

            Should anyone like to know my actual views on abortion and why I am a staunchly pro-choice Christian, I’ll be glad to write a column about that in the future. But today I am interested in discussing how the abortion debate led me to consider my formative years and what I learned then.

            During the Facebook conversation, my own mother chose to articulate her own view on abortion. From her fundamentalist point of view, abortion is always wrong, no matter the circumstances; the Bible, she says, remains clear on this matter. As proof, she offered multiple scriptures that, in her view, baldly stated how life begins at conception and that abortion therefore constitutes baby-killing. When I read the scriptures, I found that none of them seemed to address the genesis of the soul, or the point at which life begins, or God’s stance on abortion. At best, they were ambiguous; at worst, they seemed completely off-topic and/or out of context. Thus, while I admired her conviction and her courage in standing up for her beliefs, I doubted that her evidence would convince anyone not already on her side. What really troubled me, though, was a statement that she later made: “We were not by any means perfect parents. We made many, many mistakes, but we did our best to instill Christian morals and beliefs in [Brett] as a child. We no longer have any say in what he does or what he believes, but I know he’s a good man, and I stand on the promise that God will bring him back to his Christian teachings.”

            Upon reading this, I felt simultaneously proud of her assessing me a good man and angry about the rest. Here’s how I responded to that particular comment: “I take offense at the idea that I’ve got to come ‘back to my Christian teachings.’ I’ve never left them. I have a strong relationship with my God and, for the first time in my life, spiritual peace. I have achieved that peace by rejecting much of what I learned when I was a kid–not necessarily from my parents or family, but from society at large. But the teachings that I base my life on–faith, and love, and charity, and helping one’s neighbor, and so forth–stem directly from what I believe God wants me to do and what my own conscience tells me is right. I don’t hold all the political beliefs that my parents do–perhaps not any–but I reject the notion that I’m somehow spiritually bankrupt because I believe in a woman’s right to choose what happens with her own body.”

            Though I’ve taken a rather circumlocutious route to get here, these ideas, readers, represent the crux of what I’m after today. I am forty years old as of this writing—older than I can sometimes believe, especially given that I’m just now able to concentrate on my writing as a career, but still young, hopefully not even middle-aged. I am who I am today because of what I learned in the past—the past as recent as yesterday and the past as far back as the beginnings of my memory. Much of what I learned seems positive to me. Other lessons were negative, and many of these were taught me in the context of “good Christian morals” or “political ethics.” Allow me to illustrate, with a series of anecdotes, why I believe that rejecting much of what I learned as a child has molded me into the man I am today, for better or worse.

            I come from an immediate and an extended family that is deeply steeped in Christian tradition. My mother’s family members mostly go to the same Assembly of God church in Crossett, a small town in southeast Arkansas. My paternal grandfather was a Baptist deacon; my father has served in the same capacity. Some of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents on my mother’s side used to tour the area in a gospel band, singing in all kinds of churches. They did so after and beyond their work hours and their family responsibilities. If someone needs a meal, or prayer, or clothes, you won’t find anybody acting as fast or with as much conviction as my family. These are good people in most ways.

            But they have their blind spots. Once, I sat with an aunt at a family gathering. She was praising a local sports team’s accomplishments—games won, tournaments conquered, teamwork represented. Then she said, triumphantly, “And they did it all without any blacks!” She did not explain why that might be considered an extraordinary accomplishment, as if her conclusion was self-evident.

            Another time, at a Christmas gathering and right after a heartfelt prayer for blessing, one of my cousins and I were talking college football. I was extolling the virtues of LSU, my alma mater, and he was arguing in favor of the Arkansas Razorbacks. He has no connection to the Razorbacks that I know of, other than that they play in the state he lives in. He said, “You know, LSU should change their team colors from purple and gold to green and pink.”

            “What are you talking about?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

            “You know, watermelon?” he said. I still looked puzzled, so he sighed and said, “Niggers! That team is full of niggers!”

            A college football team with African-American players? Perish the thought! I had no idea how to respond to his statement, because I felt so taken aback at the very thought of disliking a team for its racial components. I thought we were living in the 21st century, not the early 19th. I also never learned why he thought Arkansas’s black players were somehow exempt from his attitude. Ah, the “logic” of racism…

            Another time, again not long after a family prayer thanking God for His blessings, an elderly family member opined that her neighborhood was falling into disrepair and squalor. For her evidence, she mentioned the recent increase in noise, attributable to “the blacks who have been moving in.” Personally, I didn’t know that African-Americans brought with them ambient noise.

            These are three of the milder examples I experienced. Countless times when I was growing up, I heard some of these good Christian people use the term “nigger” uncritically, spitting it out of their mouths like rotten meat. Show them an individual black person in need, and they are as quick as anyone to help in any way they can. They are empathetic and compassionate. But remove the individual from the situation and the faceless mass of “niggers” becomes an object of dread, spite, even hatred. I have remained unable to locate the disconnect between this racism and the rest of their values, but it exists.

            I saw more evidence of such a disconnect in school, where student groupings often broke down on racial lines.  Oh, we all played on the same sports teams and went to the same classes; during those times, you might have been fooled into thinking that racism had gone extinct in the south. But after school, or even during lunch, racial groups went their separate ways. I can’t speak to what happened in other groups, but amidst my group of white friends—again, good people in most ways—the term “nigger” was used freely and uncritically. So were terms like “faggot.” I would see these same people in church, praising God and discussing the values of love and charity and human connection. And it bothered me from an early age. I wasn’t always thoughtful or courageous enough to act on my feelings, but I knew in my heart that what I saw and heard often wasn’t right.

            At the church my parents made me go to during my teen years—a place that I hated, a place that made me feel farther from God than I ever have—I once heard a prominent member say that if any niggers ever walked in the church doors, they would walk right back out again, or he would.

            And so, as I grew up, I learned that it’s okay to be Christian and still hate people who looked different than me, especially if they were black. I learned it at school, in church, and at family gatherings. I even learned it when I drove through town, knowing that most black people lived in the section between the western city limits and the highway known as the “truck route.” Racist white people often referred to this section as “nigger town,” as if it were a separate place altogether. I’ve searched the scriptures and my own conscience over the years, and I have never found one single shred of evidence that Christ justifies such hatred and exclusion. Not one. Yet so many Christians obviously harbor hatred in their hearts.

            I mentioned above that many of my professing Christian friends used the word “faggot.” They also used “queer,” “fag,” “chocolate-churner,” “ass-bandit,” and just about every other pejorative name you can think of. These terms served to ostracize people who already did not fit in, regardless of what their actual sexualities might have been—the comic book readers with thick glasses and bad skin, the poor kids who could not afford good clothes and whose parents did not seem to own a washing machine, the gentle boys who were not interested in sports and the thickly-built girls who were. Back then at least, the children of that town seemed hyper-aware of sexuality and perfectly willing to verbally abuse, shun, and even beat up those who exhibited even one highly-stereotypical characteristic that supposedly connoted “gay.” I watched some good kids go through high school miserably, having been saddled with a label that they did not understand. Others who were gay, but closeted mostly out of self-preservation, stayed constantly on guard against themselves, lest they betray a sign of who they really were. They could not seek love, or physical contact, or acceptance because they would have been mercilessly mocked or worse, and by the people you saw in church every Sunday. This happened in late 20th-century America, in a town with more churches than you could count.

            I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, but I do not remember a single scripture in which Christ speaks out against homosexuality. There are some Biblical passages that seem to, but most of these are taken wildly out of context or refer to historical circumstances that no longer apply. I have read the works of Biblical scholars who feel the same way. In no case do I find that the Bible supports hatred of gay people or violence against them, or anyone else for that matter. Yet those who enact the worst violence against alleged gay people—and others assumed to be gay who are in fact not—often do so in God’s name. I wonder what He thinks of that.

            Once, during my first divorce, I moved in with a friend and his father, who happened to be bisexual. I needed a place to go while I sorted things out, and they took me in without question. Later, when talking with a close family member who was extraordinarily active in his church, he said, “I hope you’re having a good time living with that queer,” pronouncing the word as he might “demon” or “Nazi.”

              And so I learned—in school, with my family, and in and around church—that you can be Christian and hate gay people.

            Familial relations appear to be a problematic area, too. Once, while I was attending my first wife’s church, one of her brothers had been scheduled to sing during service; I’m sure anyone who has gone to church is familiar with the “solo.” This church was fairly large, so it had a good sound system that piped the music and vocals from the pulpit to speakers at the back of the hall, into the vestibule, even into the nursery. Someone controlled the sound from a mixing board located in back of the church; on the day of my ex-brother-in-law’s solo, his own uncle was running the board. But as the song commenced, the sound faded in and out, usually during the most emotive portions. I looked back at the uncle, and he did not seem alarmed or even aware that anything was wrong.

            After the service, I asked my ex about it. She said, “Yeah, he was mad that his son hadn’t gotten to sing, so he was messing up the sound on purpose.”

            And so I learned that it’s okay to be Christian and to screw over your own family because of petty jealousy and spite.

            In this same town lives a man who drives an old lawnmower everywhere he goes. Something is wrong with his head, and I don’t mean that metaphorically; his skull is actually crooked, tilting far out of true. This man is poor; he doesn’t drive a lawnmower because of the gas mileage. He is dirty; I have never seen him wear anything but the same pair of grimy, grease-and-dirt-stained overalls. He usually goes barefoot. He works, if I am not mistaken, odd jobs. He is, in other words, a good example of the financially downtrodden, the physically afflicted, the outcast. He is the kind of man that I believe Christ would be drawn to.

            But in that town, people make fun of him because his head is crooked, or because he drives that mower down the shoulder of our roads, or because he isn’t clean. I have heard such comments made in a church parking lot as the man puttered by on his mower. And so I learned that you can be Christian and reject those in need, that you can be pious and make fun of others’ misfortune.

            Did I learn anything positive while I was growing up? Of course I did. I learned positive lessons from my parents, my schools, my friends. But many of the lessons I learned were also negative; in other words, I learned what kind of man I did not want to be through the examples I saw around me. I did not do so immediately; I don’t claim to be better than any of the people I’ve discussed. When I was much younger, I too used words like “nigger” and “faggot.” I too made fun of the poor and negatively judged women who found themselves in adverse circumstances. I too shunned people who weren’t like me; I even participated in some of those verbal and physical rejections of difference that I discussed above.

            But I did so, I can now honestly say, to my everlasting shame. Even back then, when I heard such words and saw or even participated in such actions, a voice deep inside me cried out, “This isn’t right! You’re a liar and a hypocrite! You don’t really feel this way!” And as I grew up, I discovered that the voice was right. I was professing to be a good person, a good Christian, while my actual life exemplified beliefs that contradicted progressive politics, Christian teaching, and my own conscience. If I do any time in hell, I believe it will be because of what I did and failed to do in those early days, not because I believe in a woman’s right to choose or because I can understand why some women feel abortion to be their only choice.

            What I have done differently from so many of my peers and relatives—and I only say “differently” because you have to judge for yourself whether my beliefs are any better or worse than theirs—is that I have tried to reject those negative lessons. Rather than refusing to think about the contradictions in my stated values and my actual life, I have tried to bring the two into a kind of harmony. Rather than dismissing my own early complicity in hatred, I have tried to own it and make up for it. I don’t do so out of guilt alone; I don’t believe in civil rights for everyone, for instance, only because I feel bad that I once ignored any societal problems that didn’t directly affect me. I do so because I truly believe that it’s right—that it is what my own conscience, and my God, would have me do. I have tried to make myself a better person so that I can make the world better, and I have tried to pass those values onto my children as a counterbalance to the negative lessons that I know they, too, are learning deep in the American south.

            Does this make me (or people who think like I do) some kind of role model or paragon of virtue? No. But for the first time in my life, it does allow me to look at myself in the mirror and like what I see, to sleep at night knowing that if I didn’t contribute anything especially transcendent to the world today, then at least I didn’t make things worse. I have tried to take the positive lessons of my youth and apply them. And I have tried to take the negative lessons and build something positive from them. I try to serve as an ally for those in need, those I might have once mindlessly rejected. I don’t try to speak for them, because they can speak for themselves, but I try to do my part, and I am honored when they allow me to be a part of their missions. I strive to live by the principles of love, faith, hope, charity, and acceptance, and on those occasions when I still fail, I wake up the next day, ready to try again. I am at peace with myself and with God.

            And in this imperfect world, perhaps that has to be enough.

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Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.