Real Talk

It's Not Just "The South"

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Please Enjoy the Above Audio Recording of This Love Letter by Yours Truly.

I gave up social media. Turned out crashing into the ocean of its waves before I’d had my first morning stretch and a good morning yawn was detrimental to my health. Self-defeating. Lung-crushing. There weren’t enough dance reels or cuddly animal memes to replenish my breathless soul. So I went cold-turkey and recently celebrated five months of sobriety.

But y’all… sigh. After hearing about the recent Supreme Court decision, I broke this morning and I scrolled and I’ve been under the influence since 7:30. I tried not to look and I have yet to hit rock bottom – but the good news is came across a brilliant post by the very wise @tressiemcphd who wrote:

Louisiana. Tennessee. Alabama. The White reconstruction strategy stays the same.

I wrote this piece in 2023 before Trump 2.0 swiftly enforced his White nationalist agenda. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and the rest of the Republican Party received their marching orders.

As the Southern Black Panther Party elders keep reminding me, they have been here before. There are lessons to be learned from those before us – those who sacrificed their lives, experienced social death, and fought and won against all odds.

And this is the first comment she received on that post:

The American South has always been holding the country back from better. Always the south 🤷🏽‍♀️

To which @tressiemcphd replied:

I’m going to block you after I pin this with my reply so others know the house rules here. “The American South” isn’t “holding the country back.” White racism is. Conflating the two is exactly what racists want. The South is not uniquely racist. It is uniquely constructed to be a safe place for racists.

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I will keep this brief, dear heart-kins. My job here is to write love letters, but to love well requires healthy communication, honesty and acknowledgment of hurts and mutual agreement on what is true and right and lovely and good. Anything else just ain’t love.

If you lovely good fellows want to make this country a better place, and if you’re putting your vote where your mouth is and showing up at the polls and marching in the streets chanting “NO KINGS! NO KINGS!”, but the places you go, the neighborhood where you live, the friends you hang with, the books you read, the movies you see, the schools your children attend don’t represent the multicultural (and I do mean multi as in socioeconomic and racial) community of your dreams, then it will all be for naught. White racism is insidious. Like carbon dioxide, you hardly notice it. The death is a slow, deep sleep you can’t fight off because you don’t notice it’s happening.