Trick, Treat, or Cross Burning
Today’s entry from the If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You Are Part of the Problem Department:
What was your kid’s Halloween costume? I have no problem with wizards and dragons, as long as they are not of the imperial and grand categories, respectively.
Jessica Black of Craigsville, Virginia, allowed – though it actually sounds more like encouraged – her seven-year-old son to dress as a Ku Klux Klan member for Halloween. The boy thought “it was cool,” after he saw a Klan getup in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes.
Turns out it’s a family tradition to don the white robes on Halloween. As Ms. Black told the local television station, “It’s supposed to be white with white, black with black, man with woman and all of that. That’s what the KKK stands for.” As if to add to the organization’s righteous and upstanding image, she added, “The KKK every year, raises money to donate to the St. Jude’s.”
What a wonderful bunch of guys.
In Germany, it’s against the law to deny or tell lies about the less than 70-year-ago Holocaust. In more than 150 years, much of the American South has yet to come to terms with its own ugly and shameful past, still masking the fight to maintain slavery as the great “Lost Cause.” Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, was more recently the birthplace of “massive resistance” to the 1954 Supreme Court integration mandate and even closed public schools rather than allow in African American children.
Collectively, we often lament the neglectful, violent and deprived upbringings of children raised in poverty and ghettoes, and how difficult this makes a normal and productive adulthood.
I wonder what kind of future is in store for this young boy being brought up by a mother like Ms. Craig.
Unfortunately, this is not new. White supremacists are all over the place, from sea to shining sea as it were. It’s not just the south, though it is sometimes more “socially acceptable” here, in small backward redneck towns.
How the boy will fare depends on the neighborhood and the prevailing sentiment of the place in which they live, Will he evolve as a human? probably not. Will he have a niche in society? Oh yeah. He will gravitate to those who feel like him, should he grow up and keep his mothers teachings. They are everywhere and they know where to live and where to socialize in order to fuel the fires of their hatred and self loathing.
If he fights the tradition and evolves into a rational compassionate individual, he will have a place in society, a much better place.
His mother, she’s probably a lost cause. Either she grew up that way, or changed her thinking to fit in with her boyfriend at some time, and now dips into the shallow end of the gene pool for her dates. She chooses stupidity for herself and hate for her bedmate. Too bad she wants the same for her son.
Thanks for this serious analysis, and I love your expression, “dipping into the shallow end of the gene pool”!
I… just… there are no words…
I agree, Ryan.
“I wonder what kind of future is in store for this young boy being brought up by a mother like Ms. Craig”
It doesn’t bode well not only for the child but for the rest of us as well.
The more extreme the biases, religiosity, strictness, substance abuse, political stance of the parent, the more extreme the rebels they will breed. A pretty fair percentage rebel rather than conform to this type of mind control. That’s the saving grace. Some will rebel and rebel hard and reject those mores that they eventually saw as hypocrisy and propaganda.
We can hope so, Cornerstone. Thanks.