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A thread: My civil rights story & why I'm done with Americans.
Every MLK day I am most strongly reminded where I come from & why I literally have no place in this current country or political climate. My mother & father were a mixed race couple in Montgomery AL during
Every MLK day I am most strongly reminded where I come from & why I literally have no place in this current country or political climate. My mother & father were a mixed race couple in Montgomery AL during
The Civil Rights era. My father, half white & half Cherokee(Legit, not the BS that passes on gov forms today) & my mother--a Morena, as we in Spanish speaking countries say(we don't use the term black, a tire is black, Morena is darker, brownish) lived literally in the middle
of the fight for equality. Rosa Parks worked for my grandmother. My grandfather was the first Puerto Rican Master Sergeant in the Air Force. Both of my parents went to high school with George Wallace's daughter. They saw Dr King intermittently when he visited Montgomery
As they grew up, they experienced some of the worst acts of hate, violence & discrimination at the hands of both white AND black people. My uncle was surrounded and threatened with lynching for taking George Wallace's daughter to a pizza restaurant. My father,
a star athlete who played football at Auburn, had to fight them off to keep him alive. He was licensed to the ministry & evangelized across the state, until one day a church would not let my mother sit to hear him b/c she was black. They did not attend church again until
I began my spiritual journey at 15. When my parents attended college at Auburn, black girls would pull mother's hair to try to prove her hair wasn't real. They called her a bed wench for being married to my father. The reason my father chose Auburn over Alabama
was because he had met Bear Bryant and saw first hand how viruntly racist he was. He would not play for such a man. (Yet many coaches laud him who want to tell me Black Lives Matter. )
They would graduate college & move out of the US, only to have their lives threatened by communists in Guatemala & Honduras. They returned to the US and met a strange person at a KMart in West Palm Beach FL . That person had the voice of a friend they knew from
high school & yet looked like someone they had never seen. Turned out it was that person. He told his story of how he was literally beaten, thrown in a car, set on fire & left to die by George Wallace's goons for letting blacks into a restaurant in downtown Montgomery.
He looked so different because he was forced to have a total reconstructive surgery on his face & skin. Fast forward to the time of my existence: My family literally raised me & my sister to be completely unaware that color mattered. We quickly found out that
It mattered to all around us. My sister & I were told we couldn't be related b/c she was obviously black & I was obviously white by teachers & other adults. My sister had kids call her a nigger in front of me and look at me expectant of me joining in only to be beaten
by me. I can't tell you how many of them were shocked when I told them she was my sister & that you were calling me the same thing. On the other end, I have had black kids tell me they would fight me when I came to take her home b/c they weren't letting her go w/a white boy
It got worse as I started dating & dated black women & my sister dated black men.....I was a 'slave master' & she was a 'black d*ck whore'. As we became adults, I married a half-white half-spanish woman against my better instincts, wanting to 'save her'. My sister
married a black man. We both had kids, my son & her two sons & daughter. As they have grown up together, they have legit had increasing instances where people have told them they can't possibly be 1st cousins. Thankfully, they see the world as my sister & I do.
I share all this on Dr MLK day to say that I hope that all the people I interact with will take a minute to ask themselves if they really, truly are living out the ideals of Dr King's message or are they just posting memes. I am convinced today that more people in
Today's society genuinely hate other races more than in the Civil Rights era. More whites secretly wish black people would shut up & stop complaining. More blacks wish white people would disappear. Neither of these will get us anywhere. In fact, for many, it's not about
equality anymore, it's about having power over those who aren't like you. This was NOT MLK's dream. My mother & father had every reason to hate BOTH blacks & whites, but Dr King's ideals mattered to them & they lived them out. I hold very little if any hope
for Americans, b/c at this point, we are beyond the dream & more into the nightmare of sectarian balkanization based on false racial premise & political affiliation. As for me, I will continue to love & look at all people the same. Character before color.
It's fine to embrace culture, but it's not an excuse or a reason to call everyone racist, harm your neighbors or look down on others. If Dr King's legacy is ever going to be honored for real in America, we must start with seeing humanity again in others, not disqualifying people
