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Why Are You Obsessed with My Race?

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Charlena E. Jackson

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“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas as well as to suppress blacks. In his definitive study of disenfranchisement, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, J. Morgan Kousser quotes North Carolina Governor Charles B. Aycock, who made the point succinctly, writing several years after a violent 1898 Democratic putsch ousted the interracial Populist-Republican-Fusion government that had won consecutive statewide elections: "The Democratic party is alone sufficient. We need a united people. We need the combined effort of every North Carolinian. We need the strength which comes from believing alike." Segregation was enforced on whites as well as blacks. That reality is obscured in a contemporary perspective that flattens out history and context into a simple polarity of racism/anti-racism and reduces politics to an unchanging contest of black and white. That perspective compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle, often enough biracial or interracial, against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South, as well as ongoing struggle against and within the new order as it consolidated.”

“Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”

“81. “When are we going to wake up and call it what it is? They degrade blacks; instead of getting sprayed by a water hose, we are now getting sprayed with bullets! Instead of getting a peaceful night’s rest, our doors are getting kicked in! Oh, and instead of suffocating us with their white sheets or tying a noose around our necks and hanging us from a tree, they suffocate us by putting their knee on our neck instead. Let’s keep it real here. Who are we fooling? Racism has still has a heartbeat, and I do not see it dying anytime soon.”