A stark reminder of racism in my South Carolina neighborhood
The chicken bone sealed it. Or at least drove home the point that the long tentacles of white supremacy and anti-black racism, which stretch back to before the founding of this country, showed up in the form of a chicken bone this past week in my quiet little community. A young white guy in a truck pointed one towards my wife as he passed her while she was returning from the mailbox. He may as well have thrown a watermelon rind at her instead, the racist stereotypical symbolism was so on point.
This was just a couple of days after an 18-year-old white supremacist set out to kill black people, apparently inspired by the racist conspiracy theory that powerful Jews and others are out to replace white people with more compliant black and brown people – the kind of conspiracy he may not have gotten directly from Fox News but is a prominent feature of that network’s highest rated show, Tucker Carlson.
That 18-year-old white man, dressed in tactical gear, traveled for several hours to reach a supermarket in a predominantly black area in Buffalo, N.Y. He opened fire with an assault-style rifle he had been able to purchase despite “joking” a year earlier at school he wanted to commit a murder-suicide. He killed 13 people. That was only a few days after the athletic director at my daughter’s high school in South Carolina resigned after calling a rowdy young black student the n-word – the same word written on the gun used to kill those 13 people at that Buffalo supermarket.
The Buffalo shooting forced me to think about what Dylann Roof did in a black church in Charleston, where he massacred nine people even after they welcomed and prayed for and with him. I thought better, though, of calling a friend of mine who lost a sister during Roof’s rampage. I didn’t want to reopen wounds I know hadn’t healed since that night in June 2016. Roof, too, had become convinced that white people were in grave danger from black and brown people and decided to take matters into his own hands. Though Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of murder during a post-George Floyd protest, he had also taken things into his own hands, convinced he should carry a gun into the middle of unrest he had no reason injecting himself into.
They aren’t lone wolfs. Their actions are echoes of a darker part of American history too many of us have forgotten, ignored or unwisely believe can’t be reignited in the 21st century. The rhetoric from popular conservative talk show hosts, like Carlson, who repeatedly ask why nothing is being done to stop the “replacement” of white people, and from Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who complained that undocumented immigrant babies under the care of the federal government were receiving baby formula – you, know, to keep them alive and well nourished like a compassionate “pro-life” country should – helps to fan the flames.
When called on it, they deny wrongdoing, claim they are simply participating in legitimate political debate about complex policies. Never mind that you can argue policy without demonizing black and brown people or adopting racist conspiracy theories that began on white supremacist websites.
They aren’t the only ones struggling to cope with what’s becoming more obvious by the day. Since that strange white dude slowed down and reached over to the passenger side window to thrust a chicken bone in my wife’s face, we’ve struggled to believe it happened. Maybe he was offering her a pen? A cigarette? The doubt is likely a coping reflex – because acknowledging the reality is scarier still.