Slate - "Charlottesville Was Not a Surprise" (Important Read)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/from_forsyth_county_to_charlottesville_things_never_change.html

Growing up in a notorious all-white county, I learned that things never change unless white people do.

By Patrick Phillips

When I saw images of white supremacists raging through Charlottesville this past week, I was angered and saddened, but I was not surprised.

I was raised in Forsyth County, Georgia, one of the most notorious “white counties” in America, and a place where mob violence was the law of the land for nearly a century. After a young woman was murdered there in the fall of 1912, whites lynched a local black man, then waged a months-long campaign of terror that drove out every last black neighbor. For decades after, residents attacked any nonwhite who dared to step over the county line and kept Forsyth all-white throughout my childhood in the 1970s. In 1987, when a group of locals, including my family, marched to protest the ongoing segregation, we were met by an army of white supremacists who vowed to “Keep Forsyth White” and paraded through the streets of my hometown with nooses slung over their shoulders.

This week I have heard many white people express astonishment that such racial hatred is still part of American life. Michael Eric Dyson rightly calls such naïveté our “fatal forgetfulness.” For there is nothing new about what happened in Charlottesville, and we don’t have to look back more than a few years to find other examples of white terrorists killing innocent people: from James Harris Jackson’s 2017 stabbing of Timothy Caughman on a street in Manhattan; to Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; to Wade Michael Page’s 2012 shooting spree at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

While the list of such attacks grows longer every year, with Heather Heyer’s name now added, many white moderates cling to the fantasy that the next generation will inevitably be less racist. But growing up in the apartheid world of Forsyth County taught me that racism is not a mysterious fever that simply passes with time. It is a culture that is learned, and passed down. I watched that process all through my childhood, as kids at my elementary school told more and more racist jokes every year, and gradually hardened, right before my eyes, into the vicious bigotry of their parents and grandparents. By the time we were teenagers, I recognized some of my old classmates in the mob of locals who threw rocks and bottles at peaceful marchers in 1987.




snip - more to read at the above link.