Thursday, March 15, 2012

It Is Time Again To Chose Up Sides

I might have told some of this story before, cause there are lots of parts to it, and not all of them will be here. I have in my collection of things to finish, a project that contains a metal stencil for a sign from a Santa Fe Rail Road Station in Northern Oklahoma.  It was a small station with one waiting room. The stencil reads "Whites Only". It was used to make the sign on the waiting room door.  If you were not White, you had to sit outside on a bench at the loading dock of the station.  Not White meant Indians, Mexicans, but most especially Negros.

I have taken that stencil  and have pasted a picture on it in such a way that when I cut out the letters most of the picture can still be seen.  There's where the projected stopped.  Still haven't figured out what comes next.

The picture was taken in Indiana in 1930.  It is almost like a town festival.  everybody seems to be there, well all the White people are there.



I am from that culture. No not Indiana, the culture that kept Negro's in their place and segregated; the culture that, if it wanted to, could punish them for being uppity and Black at the same time.  I remember it.  The segregated cafe's, rest rooms, and drinking fountains or on a work site, one water bucket for Whites and one for Them. It did not seem strange.  It was the normal way things were done.



Even though we were segregated, I wasn't separated from the Negroes.  I worked in the fields with them when I got older.  I played with their kids when I was a kid and they were living in our nigger-shank during boll pulling time.  I was Naive with a capital N.  I knew what as going on but had not the foggiest notion of what it meant. When I was 15 I just happened to ride into town with a black man who had been helping me and my crop duster boss clean out his hanger.  He was just going to drop me off at my house.  Before we got there, a car passed us and some jerk stuck his head out of the window, and yelled at me by name, "f..... nigger lover".   The Black guy got real scared.  That was an epiphany for me, but I have to admit it took a couple of years to totally sink in.


Now we have a whole bunch of good solid people, citizens, that want to go back to those days for Blacks, and Mexicans, and Indians, and even for Women.  They want their America back.  No, they will tell you, that's not the America they want back.  Not that segregated one, they say, but that one where me and mine were respected.  Mind you they are good people, good Americans, our friends and neighbors and they don't have a clue as to what they are actually striving for  (some do, the bad ones).



We all have to chose which America we are willing to fight for.  If you sit on the fence on this one your wump won't survive, nor maybe even your neck.

12 comments:

Geoffrey Kruse-Safford said...

Careful, because someone might say it's wrong for you to post a photo like this, that you lack the authority to do so. . .

drlobojo said...

Yup, might happen, such has happened before. Early on I was asked why a white guys was trying to integrate the education system? My answer was simple,who is the problem,who has to change the black guys or the white guys?

Anonymous said...

It's interesting tracking the left's response to a lot of things, wondering how many understand the "non" in nonviolence not as a principle, but a situation-dependent tactic.

Of course I'm in typically bitter mood right now.

Feodor said...

Damn. You, too? This is the image undergirding your call for solidarity? The murders of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith?

You might have given their names. In using their death for a blog post, the least you could have done is give their names. Their names weren’t taken away were they?

Nor their families. They have families, too. Living ones.

But you don’t talk about them. You’re talking about white folks. Racist white folks and so I guess you wanted to show some. So you did. Which is fine. But then, I assume unthinkingly, you felt there would'nt be that punch if you didn’t show what they were so gleeful about. So you did.

You gave us two lynched black men that are important for your blog only because of how the positions of their bodies, the manner of their death reflects on the white… audience.

Lynched over eighty years ago. And still Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith cannot be seen as autonomous lives of dignity.

Even by a white man on their side.

Yeah. Like Mr. Kruse-Safford said - and like him as well - it’s not apparent to me that you have the moral grasp to copy such documents. Your first instinct does not seem to see two human beings. In other words, you have the instincts of a white man. LIke Mr. Kruse-Safford, you have the words and the comforting memories, but where is the result of efforts to retrain your own racist inheritances? When did you do the hard practice for life on our side? Or did you just show up come game times?

drlobojo said...

Excellent Feodor. What's a white guy to do? Abandon being a white guy? The post is about white guys choosing up sides. I really don't care about solidarity, just equity and justice. As for Mr. Ship & Smith they like the whites, are there to drag up the past, for effect, to give impact to the point.
" ....it’s not apparent to me that you have the moral grasp to copy such documents. Your first instinct does not seem to see two human beings. In other words, you have the instincts of a white man."
See, it worked.
Say Feodor, if I don't qualify as a good white guy what is the criteria?

Feodor said...

Oh, I am sure you’re pretty good for a white guy in a white crowd.

But we all could be better. It’s just that white men are perhaps the only specimen of humanity that take offense when it’s a suggestion for them.

drlobojo said...

Feodor, you are most assuredly a better person than I am, as you yourself know. So enjoy yourself.

Feodor said...

Again, you're avoiding the issue of you and the admittedly cavalier use of two black men for provocation.

It would be a shame if you remain comfortable in willful ignorance.

drlobojo said...

"It would be a shame if you remain comfortable in willful ignorance."
So you have appointed yourself to make me uncomfortable and reveal to me my "instincts of a white man". "Oh, I am sure you’re pretty good for a white guy in a white crowd."
The one thing I discovered early in my work was that no-one would love or respect me if I did my job of desegregation correctly. That proved profoundly true. After 30 years in the middle between all you fools of every race, I'm tired. Now you want to tell me how wrong, ignorant,and willful I am. Do that somewhere else. Don't come back here.

Feodor said...

No, no appointing.
No revelealing.
Just my thoughts, put pointedly surely, but I'm expecting to make you do anything or uncover big secrets.

Its just that - while you certainly have a right to be tired [though perhaps less of a right than the families of Mr Shipp and Mr Smith - or even ost black folks generally] - I think you allow your weariness - or at worst your laziness - to lessen the dignity of your message.

For instance: was desegregation ever the goal?

Feodor said...

I’ll leave you with this, which I think is apropos of recent events and puts you and me on the continuum as well.

libjournal.uncg.edu/ojs/index.php/
ijcp/article/view/249

drlobojo said...

To get to the articl Feodor wants you to see is here:
http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ojs/index.php/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116