Source of book: I own this
When this book was re-released in
2019, I knew I needed a copy for my library. I am collecting a number of
non-fiction works related to the Civil Rights Movement and other liberation and
justice movements in our history. In part, this is because of the ongoing push
by the Right Wing to ban these books from libraries and schools.
Mag Segrest is still around,
believe it or not. She is about the age of my parents, although she has been an
active organizer, advocate, and educator for decades. She wrote this book in
1994, mostly about her anti-Klan work during the 1980s in North Carolina.
The book is divided into three
sections. The first and longest is her memoir, which includes a lot about her
family as well as her anti-racism work. It also speaks quite a bit to the
necessary alliance between anti-racists and anti-bigots in other areas,
particularly the need for the racial justice movement to embrace the LGBTQ
rights cause and vice versa.
As she points out time and again,
with solid evidence, the two are engaged in the same fight. Racism and other
bigotries - misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, economic injustice - all come
from the same diseased part of the soul. And the bigotries combine to place
certain wealthy white males at the top of society, grinding nearly everyone
else.
The second part of the book is a
series of essays about history. Specifically, the history of the United States
as traced through the generations of her maternal ancestors, who came here
around the beginning, and were active Confederates and white supremacists down
through the generations.
These also talk a lot about
capitalism and how it depends on permanent underclasses at home and abroad. You
will get a bit of Howard Zinn here. I don’t agree with all of her points - for
example, I think that NAFTA and its successors did less harm to industrial jobs
than automation, and that simply ending free trade (e.g. the Trump tariffs)
won’t bring back those jobs. But for the most part, it holds up well.
The final part is a lecture she
gave to a Southern LGBTQ group about the need to fight for racial justice, and
it is pretty badass.
And actually, Segrest herself is
pretty much a textbook badass, doing the right thing, fighting the good fight,
living authentically as herself despite her roots, and encouraging others to do
justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.
Segrest jumps around a bit in time
throughout the book, switching between her public life fighting the Klan and
her personal life involving her parents.
And her parents are fascinating.
They had issues, for sure. Her father advocated for segregated schools, but
also weirdly respected Segrest’s completely opposed advocacy. At the end of the
updated edition, she notes that they remained friends until his death.
Likewise, her mother wasn’t happy
about the book, but they found common ground. Her mother also suffered most of
her life from a debilitating auto-immune disorder that kept her bedridden and
in pain until her early death. So she had other issues to worry about.
I was also fascinated by the way
that her very traditional Southern parents were both disappointed and yet
weirdly accepting of Segrest’s sexual orientation. Ditto for her sister, who
went all Fundie as an adult, and yet somehow kept a connection. I can’t explain
in a few words the complexity of all this, but the book does a good job.
The book tells a story that feels
very relevant today, but isn’t known all that well to those of us who grew up
on the West Coast. The 1980s were a time of Klan violence across the South,
with some events that I never even heard of until relatively recently, like the
Greensboro Massacre
and various Klan assassinations throughout the South. I certainly wasn’t taught
about modern Klan violence in our Fundie curriculum. But these are events that
directly involved Segrest and the anti-racist organization she worked for at
the time.
It is horrifying to understand
that the same people, the same organizations, and the same ideologies that
drove the Klan and the American Nazi Party back then have basically seized
control of our federal government in the form of Trump and his goons. And I
mean literally the same people and organizations.
Rather than try to summarize the
book, I am just going to go with a whole lot of quotes. The book tells a
fascinating story, by a fascinating human who is now one of my heroes.
I’ll start with a great quote from
Lillian Smith, a white woman who fought racism in her own way. I wrote about
her excellent book, Strange
Fruit, in 2019, for Banned Books Week. That book was the original
“Banned in Boston” book.
“Racism is so different from prejudice; it would be helpful
if people could begin to use words precisely, giving them their actual
meaning…We have scarcely begun to probe this illness. Let’s call it what it is:
evil. I’m not sure it is an illness, it may simply be evil.”
Although not in this quote,
Segrest makes clear elsewhere that racism requires power. Anyone can be
prejudiced, but only power can segregate and brutalize.
I am very much with Smith here:
racism is evil. It is our national sin, and it is the worst of sins, as it
dehumanizes other humans. It also is the polar opposite of neighbor-love, and
thus the most anti-Christ sin possible. (Bigotry in general is in this
category. It is the worst and most serious of sins.)
The introduction to the new
edition is worth reading. I wrote down a few quotes from it.
She quotes a black feminist
organization statement about Intersectionality that explains why all
forms of injustice need to be addressed together.
“[T]he particular task of integrated analysis and practice
based on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
I have discovered this over the
years to be true. I do not know of a single anti-LGBTQ bigot who is not
misogynistic, and I do not know of a single white anti-LGBTQ bigot who is not
also racist as fuck. I cannot think of a single exception. It is the same
disease of the soul.
Later, in the preface to the
original edition, she explains again how things interlock.
This book is by a lesbian, who cannot look at race in an
uncomplicated way, who has worked to articulate the many interfaces among
misogyny, racism, and homophobia in a culture ravaged by all three.
This book is by a woman who has never yet gone to bed hungry
for lack of food, who has never yet slept outdoors for lack of shelter, who has
never yet not worked for lack of a job, who is trying to understand a
capitalism that denies many of her fellow humans all three.
Another quote is excellent, and to
a certain (although lesser) degree, it reflects my own journey out of my family
past.
In Durham in my twenties and thirties I jumped the tracks to
the right side of history. I carried in my baggage, out of the apartheid of my
Alabama childhood, the genealogies of family members whose legacies included
the destruction of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’
Council, segregated private schools, and the murder of civil rights worker
Sammy Younge in my hometown of Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1966. It left me lots to
unpack and sort through, to discard or mend, or to wrap around me.
I too find myself as a “Race
Traitor,” one who has rejected a certain thread in my ancestry. While my
ancestors do not (as far as I know) include any KKK members, I have come to
realize that most of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations in my family hold
white supremacist views, and vote for white supremacist candidates, parties,
and policies.
There are also some good threads,
like an uncle who used his position in the LAPD to fight the Klan after a cross
was burned on his neighbor’s lawn. There are moments when my parents have been
antiracist, and they certainly taught me those values, although they seem to
have abandoned
them in the Trump Era.
I clearly have “switched sides”
like Segrest, to the right side of history. But also, weirdly, I feel like I
was raised there, and instead it is my family and my church and my country who
switched sides to the side of evil. I don’t get it. It’s disorienting for
sure.
The book opens both with a look at
history - the murder and beheading of Native American figure Osceola, and the
lynching of Younge by Segrest’s cousin - and with a preview of what will unfold
in the book in the battle against the Klan.
My immediate adversaries were Ku Klux Klansmen seeking to
restore the apartheid world of my Alabama childhood and neo-Nazis looking
toward a cataclysmic future, a globe in which only Aryans would survive their
wars to purify the white race. These extremists could operate because they
served the purposes of numb and greedy men and their systems built on
dark-skinned people’s bones and blood.
At the same time, as I noted, she
was at odds with her family.
Then there is my father, who organized a network of
segregated private schools all over Alabama. I have made a profession of being
better than him.
I kind of feel like that last line
applies to me as well. Trying to be better than my ancestors. In a later
passage, Segrest mentions the Rev. Wilson Lee, a black anti-racist organizer
she worked with.
In fact, Wilson Lee and my own daddy were the opposite sides
of a coin. My father spent much of my adolescence organizing white private
schools all over Alabama. Like Wilson, he spent many of his evenings out of the
house at meetings. When I went to Black community meetings in Statesville with
Reverend Lee, I had an eerie feeling that my father was out there somewhere
organizing the other side.
She ends the chapter with this
thought:
It’s not my people, it’s the idea of race I am
betraying. It’s taken me a while to get the distinction.
Truth.
As she should, Segrest notes that
the history of the United States has been one of the moneyed classes pitting
poor blacks and whites against each other.
In the 1890s all across the New South, northern capitalists
and a new southern owning class built a network of cotton mills on the rivers
and streams of land only thirty-five years removed from chattel slavery. Into
those mills flocked poor whites out of the hills and off depressed farms. They
entered into a pact to provide non-union, low-wage labor in exchange for the
exalted privilege of being white.
This explains a certain amount of
MAGA rage. (The average MAGA is above average in wages, below average in
education, but there is a working-class MAGA contingent.) They are used to
being able to look down on minorities, but as minorities have made gains, it
turns out they are now just poor, not exalted whites.
These whites had plenty of help in making this illogical
leap. Republican Party strategists began telling them in 1972 that the problem
was affirmative action programs, niggers getting their jobs. Forget the fact
that Black folks were still worse off than whites. And the Klan was around
again to focus white discontent.
Sound familiar? That’s exactly the
evil lie that Trump and MAGA are selling, with their anti-Diversity,
anti-Equity, anti-Inclusion push.
In another horrifying episode
involving her father, he complains about the tears shed after the little girls
were killed in the church
bombing. Young Mab is horrified.
He was wrong, and it made me angry. Like him, I withdrew into
silence.
So. Many. Times. With. My.
Parents. Particularly over the last two decades. They are wrong. Dead wrong.
Wrong as in evil in many cases. And it makes me angry. Same thing with the
religious leaders who taught me good values they had no intention of living by.
Like most adolescents, I was an idealist, and this rupture
between my teachers’ lessons and their behavior shook me profoundly. If we
could decide who could not come into our church, then it was just a building
that belonged to us, not God. It took me years to articulate my disquiet.
Didn’t the same act of locking other people out also lock us in?
Amen.
There are some great stories told
by Rev. Lee in this chapter. And also this one by his wife Alice.
Alice Lee was as brave as her husband. She told me once about
a series of threatening calls to their home. She would answer the phone, only
to hear a white male’s voice. The first time he called with a string of obscene
insults, she said, “That’s your mama.” The second time he called to harass her,
she said, “That’s your grandmamma.” The third time she said, “That’s your
great-grandmamma.” The fourth time, she said, “I can’t go back any farther than
that, or we will be related.” He hung up and did not call again.
That too is the truth of America.
We are related, literally, through our bloodlines. As Albert
Murray noted, not only do virtually all of the descendants of the enslaved
have white genes, it comes from the rich and powerful of that era.
Another interesting story in this
chapter reminded me that the current group of would-be book banners is no
different from the old one. Back in the day, the Klan showed up to protest
supposedly “obscene” books. And yes, some of the books are literally the same
books now as then. It is the “same old serpent” as Abraham Lincoln put
it.
Segrest also describes the
“nighthawks,” the heavily armed security force for the Klan. Then as now, they
were also self-proclaimed “followers of Christ” despite standing for the polar
opposite of Christ’s teachings. The Klan has always claimed to be “christian.”
It just uses the initials MAGA now.
I ran across an unexpected and
fascinating connection in this book. I am a huge fan of Rhiannon Giddens, an
African-American musician and composer who has incredible musical range.
Trained as an opera singer, she co-wrote the opera Omar,
which I wrote about on this blog, and has been a champion of roots music,
bluegrass, and all the connected art forms co-created by white and black.
So anyway, Segrest talks about her
work with the magazine, Feminary, which was a lesbian publication back
in the day. One of the names she mentions as being involved was Deborah
Giddens.
While I cannot 100% confirm that
this is Rhiannon’s mother, it seems extremely likely. I do not know how many
black lesbian women activists with that name are from Greensboro, and at that
exact time in history, but it seems to me highly likely that this is the same
person. That’s pretty cool.
This leads to a discussion of
feminism and racism, including the uncomfortable fact that many first wave
white feminists engaged in racist rhetoric in arguing for female suffrage.
Specifically named are two women that did a lot of good, but, like all heroes,
had feet of clay: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sigh.
But that is part of what Segrest
is getting at, is that white activists need to get over ourselves a bit, and
recognize that misogyny is also about racism, just like anti-LGBTQ
bigotry is rooted in misogyny.
Also important here is another
issue that Segrest raises regarding allies who inadvertently place LGBTQ or
black people at risk. She mentions her friend Carl, who succumbed to AIDS in
the 1980s.
Carl once explained his disillusionment with the community
organizing he had done, the ways some organizers would “manipulate people into
taking certain steps” without risking the repercussions themselves.
This chapter also has a great
discussion of the concept of “bad blood” - something Hitler talked about a lot
(“Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world.”)
and also that Trump and his goons also talk about a lot. It’s the same old
serpent. It is interesting to see how both blame disease on “those people,”
seeing Jews and brown people as inherently diseased. This really should be a
whole blog post if I get time. It undergirds Trump’s botched response to Covid
as well as RFK Jr.’s approach to measles.
And yikes, Tuskegee. The
experiment where black men were allowed to die of syphilis due to lack of
treatment in the name of “science.” The men were not even told what they were
sick from, instead that it was “bad blood.” God. Segrest ties this to our criminal
lack of response to AIDS decades later. We let people die because we saw them
as the contamination, not viruses.
I also have to quote a
conversation at a trial that Segrest recounts. I am thinking I might have to
use it myself.
“Miss Segrest, are you a l-”
Here it comes, I thought, bracing myself.
“-liberal?” he completed.
“Are you a fascist?” I asked, then walked away.
Mic drop.
I found that the chapters about
family were particularly fascinating, probably because of my own political
break with my parents and my subsequent estrangement as a result. There is a
line in the chapter about her mother’s death that resonated for me.
I had dedicated the book [of essays] to Mother “for all she
taught me, and all she left for me to learn,” its origins in my mid-adolescent
realization that something at home was very wrong and that I could not take the
world as my mother taught it to me.
Yeah, that sounds very
familiar.
And also this, about how her
parents, like mine, dealt unhealthily with their fears.
They stuffed it all into a myth of domesticity that they had
dreamed out in the long war years and now saw refracted back from the new
television screens.
A later chapter centers on a line
from Alice Walker, in a discussion of Flannery O’Connor. A great Southern
writer whose work nonetheless suffers from unconscious biases.
For Walker, she goes with “Take
what you can use and let the rest rot.” This has served as a solid approach to
life - and to reading - for me. Perhaps it could serve as a motto for this
blog. It certainly describes my relationship to my upbringing. There was a lot
of good. And lot of poison. Take what you can use. Let the rest rot.
In another passage later - about
the murders at a queer-owned bookstore by the Klan - there are more explicit
connections drawn between white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hate. In fact, the
neo-Nazis that are eventually put on trial for the murders are explicit that
their “Aryan God” - their own words - compels them to “declare war against
Niggers, Jews, Queers, assorted Mongrels, white Race traitors, and despicable
informants.”
A more positive conversation takes
place between Segrest and her long-time fellow civil rights advocate, Christina
Davis-McCoy. The two of them ended up having a falling-out due to a combination
of factors that included health issues, but remained allies even after both
left the organization. (The updated book has a chapter on where key figures
ended up, and Christina contributed her own bit including kind words for
Segrest and their cause back in the day.) I want to quote her in an earlier
passage:
“For me, the real issue is that the hope for the world rests
in us, people of goodwill, people of consciousness, working together to do the
hard work of reforming, deconstructing, reworking this society.”
Indeed.
Segrest contrasts the community
she found in marginalized groups, that didn’t really exist among racist whites.
She makes a point that very much applies to our present time.
[F]ascism was about isolation, about political movements
deliberately breaking down the human bonds between people so that they give
blind allegiance to a leader or ideology.
The epilogue ties up the memoir
portion of the book, and it has a number of lines I liked.
Writing autobiography, if nothing else, has deepened my
appreciation for why people write fiction.
And this one:
Individuals project onto others the characteristics they
cannot accept in themselves, then control, punish, or eradicate the objects of
those projections (whether female, dark-skinned, homosexual, poor, Jewish….)
Our identities, structured as they are on what we hate, resist, or fear, are
disturbingly unstable. This leads to further repression and gives us a curious
interest in proliferating the things we oppose.
Some interesting family stuff
makes it in here too, like her father telling her that she was too hard on
herself in the book. Again, it is weird that they ended up respecting each
other at the end. Her sister, likewise, said, “Your memories are your memories,
and you have a right to them in your own book.”
That particular line hit hard for
me, because one of the big disagreements I have had with my parents and my
sister is over my right to tell the story of my life. They think they
own my memories, and that I have no right to my own perspective if it conflicts
with theirs.
Another interesting bit came in a
passage where Segrest mentions the later lives of some of the people from her
early years. In particular, it is fascinating to see how some of the families
of her gay friends eventually came to accept them.
One of them, a mother of one of
the murdered gay men, actually came out and said, “There should be classes in
school, like sex education classes, that teach that people like this may be in
your family and how to accept it.” She gave permission for the line to be in
the book.
And damn, YES! This is exactly
what we need. And exactly why Fundie bigots fight so hard against
scientifically accurate sex education, including information about the
existence of LGBTQ people, and work to ban books that acknowledge their
existence.
This wraps up the first section of
the book.
The next section was really
fascinating. As I noted above, I disagree with a few of her opinions about the
economic issues. For example, I think she falls into the error of many white
liberals of thinking that economic insecurity drives racism and the KKK. The
problem with that is that the Klan has always recruited from the upper middle
class - and MAGA itself has higher than average income. (But lower than average
education.) The driver, in my view, is not economic but social. Seeing women
and minorities gain some degree of social equality threatens them most.
It is the loss of that supremacy that drives racism, rather than pure
economics. Otherwise, the poorest whites would be the most racist and MAGA, but
they aren’t.
I already mentioned the problem of
automation, but I also want to mention here that Segrest seems negative about a
service-sector based economy. She is correct that we do not pay our service
sector workers adequately, but I also think that it is inevitable if we accept
automation that the service sector will be the source of most jobs. And
honestly, we don’t really need more manufactured crap widgets. We need teachers
and medical care workers and all the other service sector people - the ones who
care for others and do the human work that is the most vital in our
society.
That aside, Segrest is correct
that the solution needs to be to address the problems of predatory capitalism.
(Which is not the same thing as free enterprise, commerce, or markets. This
could be a whole post, but it is the concentration of wealth - and yes, the
means of production - that drives inequality in our society.)
These chapters are all about
Segrest’s ancestors, as they lived in the midst of the colonialist capitalism
of the last 400 years.
My goal, then, is to provide an overview of the history of
racism in the United States that can be read in one (long) sitting: a place for
beginning students and activists to understand the extensive and cruel history
of institutional racism, as well as for others more veteran to review this
history in light of the present emergency; to understand how capitalism has
worked with racism to write various of us into it differently according to
gender, class, sexual orientation, nationality, geography, and skin color. The
essay has had an additional value for me in getting a historic perspective on
my own family’s emotional dynamics.
Early on, in a passage about how
Europeans somehow lost their ability to feel empathy and community, Segrest
notes the toxic fruit. This goes back a long way - Howard Zinn has speculated
that the slave societies of Greece and Rome were a factor.
It is this failure to feel the communal bonds between humans,
I think, and the punishment that undoubtedly came to those Europeans who did,
that allowed the “community of the lie” to grow so genocidally in the soil of
the “New World.”
Even a cursory look at the
statements against empathy and in favor of genocidal violence coming from the
Trump regime reveals these evil roots. As does the swerve of right-wing
religion toward treating empathy as a grave sin.
Segrest also notes what many Black
writers have for centuries: race is an invention, an excuse to justify
exploitation. “White” isn’t a biological category, but a made-up social one. It
is very real in the way it affects people, but it is a human invention.
This creation of white identity in late seventeenth-century
Virginia is what James Baldwin recognized. The implications are profound: if we
white folks were constructed by history, we can, over time and as a people,
unconstruct ourselves. The Klan knows this possibility and recognizes those
whites who disavow this history as “white niggers,” “race traitors,” and
“nigger lovers.” How, then, to move masses of white people to become traitors
to the concept of race?
That is the question, isn’t it?
For a fellow “race traitor” like me, this is ultimately the goal. To convince
other white people that white identity has harmed all of us, black, white, and
brown.
One of the most interesting parts
of these essays is the passage detailing the history of cooperation and
antagonism between the abolitionist/civil rights movement and the feminist
movement. At times, there was constructive cooperation, and those who recognized
that racial justice and gender justice are linked. For example:
This radical analysis emerged as a contradiction to the
moment when growing industrialism encouraged the “cult of true womanhood,”
confining pious, domestic, submissive, and pure - therefore middle class -
“true” women to the home at a time when more and more poor women were entering
the factory workforce.
The “cult of true womanhood” - aka
the “cult of domesticity” - has been devastating in my birth family. But it
also arose out of a need to enable idle white women to look down on women of
color, immigrant women, and poor women who had to work. Recognizing the role of
this cult in enforcing racism and classism is a significant reason I rejected
it in my own marriage and family.
Eastern Europeans battled their way into the white working
class, while non-Europeans were often excluded from the unions and the economic
progress that resulted from labor struggles. Like the “cult of true womanhood”
that worked to draw the line around who was a “real woman,” race ideology
created a highly elastic “cult of true whiteness”; both of these seemingly
biological categories drew their power in part from their volatility and their
power to exclude.
Yep, the Irish and the Italians
used to be “not white” until they were.
The family stuff is fascinating
too. Segrest’s mother never really knew her father. He died of malaria
complications when she was young, so she never experienced the dark side of him
like the rest of her family did.
She loved her daddy the way women love men they never knew
except through other people’s stories.
And also this:
In my forties I have begun to deal with the effects of my
sense of abandonment from her absences, my panic from her sickness: issues
usually privatized in therapy discussions of “dysfunctional families,” but in
fact with historical causes and dimensions, racism not the least of
these.
The final main section (not
including the brief updates for the second edition) is the lecture to the LGBTQ
group. I really loved this for so many reasons, and wrote down a number of
quotes.
Those of you making your first trip South may already be
disoriented by our peculiar blend of hospitality and repression, which comes
from having spent 246 of the last 374 years as a slave culture.
Oh man, I know that feeling. It
really is a bizarre culture in so many ways, from the casual racism of people
who don’t think they are racist, to the hospitality foreign to the West Coast
where I am from, to the oddly repressed ways of thinking. Of all the people I
know from around the country, it is the Southerners that have been the hardest
to connect with. Yes, there are exceptions, but on the whole?
The passage on civil rights and
intersectionality is excellent.
The only “special right” that the United States gives to
minorities is the right to be the target of genocidal policies. We have only to
look at AIDS policy to confirm this truth. Just as we do not want people of
color buying the Right’s homophobic argument that we are after “special rights,
not civil rights, it is also vital that our movement does not buy the racist
backlash to affirmative action propagated over the last two decades by the same
Republican forces. When we put both parts of their strategy together, it’s
clear that, to them, all civil rights are “special rights” that
victimize privileged white men. When any “minority,” whether racial, ethnic,
gendered, or sexual, buys into these wedge strategies, we play ourselves for
fools and disrupt the possibility of a transformative political majority in the
next century.
Sigh. And now we have MAGA,
convinced that those poor white males are being discriminated against because
women and people of color do a bit better than they used to.
If we follow the ethnicity theory, we perpetuate the belief
that the issue of “homophobia” is mainly a matter of personal prejudice, which
contact with us will diffuse. We ignore the extent to which the most powerful
political and economic forces in this country have an investment in our
degradation. Literally, right-wing groups invest millions in slandering us,
knowing that these efforts will build up their grassroots base and their
funding chests.
Sad that this is true, but it very
much is.
I also loved that she pointed out
how much our culture - descended from the Puritans, the Victorians, and an
entire toxic religious tradition of mind/body duality - Gnosticism of the
modern age - hates bodies. Because of this, we are able to hate people whose
bodies differ from ours, whether in skin color or sexual expression.
We know that in some cultures that do not hate the body, the
male and female principles are not so much at war as they are in this culture,
and that gender-transgressive people like the berdache in American
Indian societies are considered holy people - as we are holy people.
And also this:
But we gay people also bring the knowledge that humans are
not only “means of production,” however much capitalism seeks to define us that
way. We know and insist that our needs include not only the survival needs of
food, shelter, health care, and clothing but also dignity, pleasure, intimacy,
and love.
The lecture ends on a very
positive note, and a call to take up the cause of human thriving for all
of us.
In our movement, we see the opportunity in the crisis to do
what we should have done twenty-five years ago: increase our determination to
keep faith with one another by not tolerating racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
ageism, the fear and neglect of the disabled, or class divisions in ourselves
or in our organizations.
…
This reenergized movement will be, in Suzanne Pharr’s
eloquent terms, “not a wedge, but a bridge”; not a point of division, but of
expansion and connection. To those who insist on denying us our full humanity,
we will insist on the sacred humanity of all people.
The final word I will leave from
the book comes in the updated Afterword, which gives the end of the story for
some of the people in the book. For one of the white supremacists, he ended his
life on death row for a stupid anti-Semitic murder spree that ended up killing
people who weren’t even Jewish. This came after he had already buried
two of his children, and descended into an increasingly psychotic racism and
degradation.
Segrest points out the irony for
white supremacists. They claim to be worried about “white genocide” - the
“great replacement theory,” and other paranoias resulting from their panic
about loss of privilege; but they are literally
killing themselves and people like them.
White Supremacy IS white
genocide.
This is the tragedy of racism and
bigotry. It hurts all of us, black, white, brown, male, female, seniors,
children, gay, cishet - everyone. It is a poison that can only kill and injure,
not heal. It has borne toxic fruit in my birth family, in our nation, and
around the globe.
In fact, it is the polar opposite
of Christ’s “greatest commandment”:
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Neighbor love does not sort people
into hierarchies. It does not relegate some neighbors to suffering. It does not
look down on neighbors because they are different. It does not set up and
maintain systems of oppression, but dismantles them so all can thrive.
This is a fascinating book, and I
highly recommend it.
