Connecting Causal Racist Connections

ON AUGUST 28, 1963, Martin Luther King gave his immortal speeh in front of a quarter million people, and my mother turned 43. My mother was a late bloomer;I was in third grade. A fewhours before the speeck, King visited JFK at the White House, and promised to keep it non violent. Three months later, Kennedy was killed and we were sent home from school shorly after noon. I didn't pay any attention to the speech, knew nothing about racism,( I wowuld learn a great deal about it soon enough), and am fortunate to this day that I was raised by a mother who passionately hated racism. Funny family. My mother, who would have been one hundred and three today, was four years older than my Uncle bob, whom I am partially named after. She hated racism; he was as racist as they come, although he learned to hide it from mom and me, and to proudly display it in front of his own nuclear family, the considrate coward. I recall that he sometimes slipped up. My sister reported that once, in a converation with him, he inadvertantly used the phrase "Matin Luther coon Day". Clever guy, that Uncle Bob. I learned about the MLK speech, and I learned about slavery, the Civil War, segregation, and all the rest. I learned aobut the murder by bomb of those four little transescant black girls in Birmingham, Alabama,on September 15,1963. What I didn't learn until just the other day was to connect the dots. I had always regarded the four girl murders as merely another racist hate crime in a racist America in which racist hate crimes are a dime a dozen, par for he course, and always ave been. Check the dates. This particualr racist hate crime was not random at at all, but a diret reaction to, a "pushback" as we like to say today, to the King march and speech. How dare that uppity N word stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of te damned Yankes who freed the N words, and have the audacity to even suggest, much less scream, that the N words needed to be treated better, like actual human beings, instead of being content to stay in their rightful low lying place, and be happy about it and grateful for it. Oh, how my Uncle Bob must have hated that fateful day! I still wonder whether he even bothered to send my mother is sister a brith ay card, or spring for wat was then a very expensive long distance happy birthday phone call. Now I'll never know; somehow, I doubt it. If he did, I'll bet he didn't say a word about that damned Martin Luther coon. I'm quite sure that, raised differently, under different circumstances, I was at one point perfectly capable of becoming and being a racist. Who, in all honesty, isn't, at least in theory? Hell, I enjoy feeling superior as much as the next man or woman. But to me it simply isn't worth it. Isn't worth the cognitive dissonance, the internal moral conflict, the energy drain of unrequieted, unreasoning, hatred. Its only one small step from racism to outright misanthropy, and I come too close to covering this dubious distance in any event. Like Bertolt Brecth wrote: "I make friendds with people. And I wear a derby on my head as others do. I say "they are strangely stinking animals". And I say, "no matter, I am too". Maybe I could be a racist if it made any sense to me. I would just as soon be bigoted against blondes, or tall people. (I'm short and dark haired, at least I was before I turned gray). I am no better than your garden variety racist, and don't claim to be. But at least, if nothing else, I reserve my unreasoning hatred for people and situations which are arguably worthy of it.