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As someone whose family have deep+wide Dixie roots going back forever, it’s overwhelming to read how awful people my great+grandparent’s age were during the Civil Right Movement. #BlackHistoryMonth 
I doubt they were part of, say, the mob who attacked the Freedom Riders during the Mother’s Day riot in Birmingham, but they surely voted in such a way to put people like Bull Connor or these people in power. (From Eyes on the Prize)(Albany, Georgia, btw).
As Southerners, we don’t do a good job of realizing that people are complicated and can be loving and hateful at the same time. We are very defensive because people from other places point their fingers at us and our natural reaction is to flip one back at them.
We can’t hide behind bullshit words like tradition and culture and worse, states rights. If we consider ourselves Americans we have to acknowledge the rights of all, rights that in our quiet moments of introspection we know we’re not extended to all.
Do we believe in the Declaration of Independence? The Constitution as a living document because it contains within itself the apparatus to amend itself? In the words of Jefferson that appear at his memorial? Do we believe in America or “tradition”?
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t be against white supremacy and freak when that means taking down monuments erected during the Lost Cause era, a movement that Southerners supported because it absolved *their* parents and grandparents while re-establishing white supremacy.
The need to defend ourselves and our family is strong and it is natural. But there are limits. And there is simply zero justification for the physical, mental and economic suffering of people who were singled out punished simply because of the color of their skin?
A lot of us say that we had nothing to do with the past and shouldn’t have to be punished for the actions of our ancestors. Or that black people are free now and bring their problems onto themselves, that they have all the opportunities White people do. Bullshit.
We vote. We react on social media. We defend people who shoot unarmed children and scold people when they protest in ways that we disapprove of—basically anything we can’t easily disregard.
Be more like MLK we say. Of course peaceful marches back in MLK’s day were met with state violence. Black kids who sat at lunch counters were spat on and had cigarettes put out on their backs.
And we somehow think the ledgers were cleared because the Civil Right Act passed or Obama was elected president? Brown vs Board of Education happened in 1954. People last year kept bringing up how Biden fought school integration 21 years later. Systems don’t disappear overnight.
We like to publicize black people who are critics of anti-racist organizations or scoff at the idea of systemic racism. That ain’t new. People are complicated and tradition has real gravity. (Again from Eyes on the Prize, from the first Greensboro lunch counter sit-in in 1960.)
Here’s the thing: we have a pretty good idea of what is just and what is unjust. It’s not enough to say it. We have to walk the talk, too. But for now, can we at least start saying it again?
