Crashing and Burning

Currently the state of the world now seems as if it is crashing and burning into a wall of Covid. There are few havens of safety and in turn places that seem to have handled this crisis well.  Well, not true as many countries have been successful in stomping Covid transmissions but this walk in the woods is not over yet and the sun is setting and its not getting brighter anytime sooner.

A great deal of success seems to center on Women leaderships and how they approached their response to this in both political and social ways.  Those two issues are essential for a buy in to gain the cooperation and more importantly the collaboration of those in communities to uphold the demands placed upon them.   We can look at each approach and realize that to compare New Zealand to Taiwan is a relative easy one as they are small in size and have a smaller populations to manage.  Then we have Sweden the outlier in the idea they did nothing but ask those to be careful with the idea of herd immunity as the ultimate goal. It did not work as planned, and they faced serious deaths but in the process I have never heard from one single person in Sweden with regards to how they felt about it.  We here in America have never stopped opining on that. Well funny there was a survey on that and it was the cohort more at risk and older who responded favorably to the Government’s plan.   And if you recall when Texas’s Lt. Governor said that old people would be willing to be sacrificed to get the economy going he may have well been right with regards to Swedish people but  I am 60 and no, no I’m not.  But in turn Sweden’s populace has greater respect and trust in Government which few Americans do and given the dopey Grandpa in office that is not surprising.

But in reality that is why he was elected, to drain the swamp and of course he was the greatest swamp dweller of them all in his private life so why would that change in the present.  The Federal Government became a divisive mess of partisan politics with the arrival of the swamp king from Louisiana, Newt Gingrich.  Now given that Newt was from Pennsylvania originally, it seems fitting that he found his tribe in the place where marshes and swamps dwell.  He is the one man who turned Congress into a blood sport and that is being carried on with another Southerner, Mitch McConnell.  Between those two enablers of Trump (for the record Newt in the early days was Trumps back up surrogate) it explains much of the bizarre contradictory behavior.  I have often thought Trump was from the South, given his idiocy, his pretentiousness and his overwhelming raging temper and racist leanings.   Again, I cannot stress enough that racism is not a Southern “thing” but the arrogance, the moral superiority, is built in the DNA and in turn racism is just a part of that but it is not mutually inclusive.  Racism is fear of the outsider and with the current state of America that has now been turned towards the Immigrant.  This is largely directed to those of Latin origins but this includes anyone not white.  And yes this means Africans, Indians, Middle Easterners and anyone not Christian.  The South really loathes those not Christian, so Jews, Russians or Greek Orthodox, Hindus, etc.  are not going to be any more welcome.  However they may be more tolerated as they are again not of a color that that is black or brown.  For the record folks from India, the founders of Caste system are often respected as they are ultra conservative in politics and attitudes.  Funny how that works out. I have said had anyone talked to any Latinx family they too would be surprised, they are conservative and religious but it is Catholic and again I have met many Evangelicals who suspect Catholicism as a faux religion. Again religion and money rule in that region over race.

Right now in Tennessee they are a hot mess, they are in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas and the rest of the alignment that defines the South. It appears that for all show and tell, Tennessee is expecting a rash of financial failures.  For all the lists they loved to claim they were on, the failed to mention the most in debt.   And look at the bankruptcy filings by State and reconcile them as per capita as New York makes sense given the size and scale of businesses/people here, but that top ten list is regarding Commercial lending. What is interesting is that States much smaller in scope and size,   the amount of debt on the personal level and the South is right up there in both. Surprised? No. I have never lived anywhere where I have seen means and ends not meet and denial is the river that runs smack through Nashville its just called the Cumberland.

As for Southern men, they  are a unique breed. I have repeatedly given the women the moniker of cum dumpsters, and that is largely a way they are raised as worth comes from the vagina, to attract the right kind of man an in turn breed.  But again, here is the conundrum,  men are not raised by men, they are usually raised by their Grandmother, the Matriarch in the family.  It is she who instills in them the whole notion of heritage and manliness all while not facing the truth that their own children have dumped them with another generation to raise, so they toughen their children to match their skin, rough, worn and scarred from the abuse, physical and mental, they endured themselves over their years.  It is a cycle that is very much the beauty parlor philosophy – lather, rinse, repeat.

And when you look at the leadership of this area, all white, and all male they are children in search of a  Mother and of course the resentment that in fact that is what they want – Mama.  One’s Grandmother is not the same as a Mother and it instills the Misogyny and distrust of women that dominates the Southern mentality.  Obsessed with sex they fear Homosexuality as that is the ultimate in male power,  the ability to fuck without recourse or that women can be happy without men.  As for Transgender folks that just is too much, it simply confuses them and frightens them more. If you can be a man then how can they be their own man?  Competition is the rule and the honor code is the game.  Almost all violence centers on sex and money. That is the twinset of Southern rules. And it explains that for the last decade the same states have gravitated to the businessman as leader or retaining it in family dynasties, which is another Southern thing.  We have that here right now with Cuomo,  but the cities and states across the country are largely helmed by professional legislators/career politicians or as Trump calls them “swamp dwellers.”  Ask Ohio about Mike DeWine.

Again folks I don’t hate the South, I just get it.  It wants to be someone else, anyone else but it also wants to be loved as it is.   Think of a 10 year old child who just wants you to love them as they are but they are angry, stubborn and selfish and just won’t play nice. That is the South.   Who else does it sound like?   That is the only difference between Trump and some of the other Southern elite, he was raised WASP and spoiled by a Scottish mother and abused by a Teutonic father.  But the end results were the same, childish, abusive, spoiled, stubborn and retaliatory.  Welcome to the South!

As I watch what happens in Tennessee it makes sense as you see it throughout the rest of the region, a businessman elected Governor (a Trumpolyte) , a lack of communication, an agenda, blurred lines about personal and professional obligations, an obsession with the Church (real or imagined), focus on money while eschewing the reality that most of the state and its constituents are laden with debt while professing fiscal responsibility.  The best part is the overwhelming cases in Alabama with a woman Governor whom Trump has not vilified despite her own issues and failures but hey its the South and they want women to fail too!  You can see the constant contradictions that I call the reality of the South, the wishing to be one thing while being that which you hate.  And all the Covid idiocy has been from the Governors of the region, its a dumb off down there clearly.  Ah the conundrum that plagues all of the area and that crosses color lines. I read today about the meltdown of Andrew Gillum of Florida and thought, “Where have I heard and seen this before?”  Oh yes Ray Nagin, the former Mayor of Orleans who was complicit in some of the most horrific racist bullshit during Katrina and well documented in the book with the same name.  Ah the white power brokers never stop marginalizing the black man and that time in that place in history is an utter atrocity that shows how money can do more damage than even a hurricane could.

And while South Carolina and Louisiana have both elected Governors of Indian heritage, Nikki  Haley has tried desperately to remain relevant even after leaving a job in the Administration of which she was vastly under qualified for and Bobby Jindal, is well nowhere to be found after his own idiocy was  revealed, only continues to prove to me that when you are a face of color in the South you are a convenient shield from which to hide behind. For it is the faces behind the door who are controlling it all  and they are anything but of color, and of any gender other than male.

I have seen this repeated throughout history, by putting faces of color in jobs that are high profile, Clarence Thomas comes to mind, and enabling them to do little more than simply protect that job and using boring tropes and myths to somehow justify how they earned their way with the whole bootstraps bullshit.   I have not seen nor heard of Thomas helping young faces of color excel nor move forward in the legal field or mentor anyone of import.  I am aware the Obama’s are doing so but at this time I can  understand why that is not as active as it should be, but Thomas has been in his gig a long time.   And his wife is another Trumpian who has no interest in mentoring anyone nor doing anything but putting forward policy that is to say racist and elitist.  I would also mention Ben Carson, who for a brain surgeon neglects to have a functioning one. Again the caste system is alive and well in America.

And there is no irony that in the most liberal bastions of Seattle and Portland that black vans and unmarked cars, conveniently rented from Enterprise Car Rental are sweeping young and largely white protestors up and dumped later with little information as to where they were taken and held during that time.  Are these the same facilities used by ICE? I suspect so.  And again this is not new behavior but like the Moms who marched, they too have a role in history over Civil Rights. But when white folks do it its as if its a new shiny toy in which to play with.

As for my new home State, New Jersey, well its New Jersey, and we swing in more directions that a Trump golf club, from Christie the fatty swampiest one to the business elite Murphy, we just have no clue and this is a State where  we are even more corrupt and sexist than the South and no one seems to care.  And with that I suspect Murphy is history come next election as many in most States will find themselves at the end of the line.  Irony that it appears New York State is going to be the most liberal political state in America.  Once again proving that I was right to come here when I did and not one day goes by where I thank myself for that decision. God, not so much, as I have never thought he was real other than being a good invisible friend to talk to.  As for Jersey,  we seem to be outliers and I love it here for that very reason, no one gives a flying fuck about anything here.  We may do it first, we may do it worse, we may do it better, but hey it’s New Jersey so fuck it.    But one thing is that none of our streets burned during all of this and those that did were quickly put out.  No black vans, no massive press coverage, just handled without histrionics.

 Just one PATH stop away is Newark, the other Manhattan, and both saw protests and unrest. It was non existent in Newark as their Mayor was front and center, while in Manhattan it was a week of unrest but the protests have been ongoing.  However right now is the summer of violence and  we have a new plan, as the Cops who have decided to give us a preview of what it will be like when the Police are defunded.  Apparently they will not be there when children are gunned down in the streets in broad daylight, or are shot crossin the street, at a  BBQ, or in a playground.  But a murder of a wealthy tech entrepreneur is solved within a week. Well money talks.  And to add more mystery to irony the tech dude was Indian, the alleged killer, a young black male who used to work for him.  Or did he? Again there will be a story as all crimes have history and a past. We live in the past now in the present.

As for us here on the East Coast the reason why there are no black vans here – MONEY. We are the financial center of the world and Trump’s family still have interests here.  The adage goes, follow the money and so I do. That and Fox news is in Manhattan and they can’t be having shit in front of their studio so guess where they target? The West Coast.

And that is why in the South, the riots in Kentucky continue but without interference as that is home to Mitch McConnell.  Where Covid is running rampant there is no Governor screaming on TV daily as ours did to demand accountability and in turn try to do something versus nothing.  And the Governors of Washington and Oregon are of course not as vocal and posturing in their demeanor as Cuomo is and that has a lot to do with also what is happening.   Cuomo is a bully and that is well known among anyone in the area and I suspect that throw down would do nothing for Trump so pick on the easy targets, as Oregon’s Governor is a woman and Inslee of Washington State is well, Inslee.  Seattle’s Mayor a woman and Portland’s Mayor who tried to join protests, Trump gleefully proclaimed he “got his ass beat.”  This is Trump, he is the Southern President right down to racism, elitism, sexism, and of course the bullying tied to the honor code.  And yet perhaps one of the most dignified and beautiful memorials occurred this weekend, with the late John Lewis, making the last trip home.  Again if this was about those whose faces are Black, the issue is not about color but about race and again about poverty.  It is always about money first in the South and when you have fame, success, and recognition then color is not an issue unless it serves to be one.  It is a complicated dynamic.

The critical element here is allowing if not forgiving the South for slowly realizing Confederate flags, Statues and other memorabilia dedicated to the Civil War is less about heritage and more about racism and suppression than recognition of what amounts to loss and ostensibly war crimes but hey one thing at a time!  The New York Times did this piece on a town that centers almost solely on Civil War icons and how does and can it change? The idea that you can erase this history and who these people are is perhaps the worst idea ever.  If that was the case why do we teach about Hitler? Stalin or any other despot or individual capable of hideous acts?  To perhaps not repeat history?  I do think that there should be a Civil War Museum dedicated to the Confederacy, to contain the statutes, the letters and other items that enable a teaching moment to put context and understanding to the complicated issues that surround the Civil War.  In the same vein that Tom Cotton is in histrionics about the 1619 Project, it is just another tool in which to use to offer perspective. Again I recall the People’s History of the United States being controversial at some point, and today I wonder if anyone has ever heard of it or if it is still used?   If all curriculum was left to the ed reformers it will strictly be STEM and that would remove any of the icky sticky shit like English, History and PE that nerds never did wellin anyway. Right Bill Gates?  And that is why subjects like Music and Philosophy and Civics are barely taught if at all as they cannot be tested to a metric that takes away the objective versus the subjective. Yes I can ask you names and dates but the nuance, the actual long term affects and effects of an act or deed that went beyond the moment in time is in fact interpretational.  We can say Columbus was a man who destroyed a peoples but in turn he is a respected individual in history and a man of respect in the Italian community.  Who wants to wrestle with that one? Not me.  Just keep it basic, simple and allow those to take from it a full and realized portrait, warts and all.   You can sill look at a Picasso and see the beauty beyond the artist and yet there is no beauty without the artist.  It’s never going to be easy and that is why we don’t want to teach it or do we? Or more importantly how?  No one will like it regardless and yes someone will be offended and that is how life is. But not today, we cannot have that today. Grow the fuck up, we are not perfect, not ever will be and that is what makes us all better for it.  We crash and burn and we get up and heal. And yes you do heal, you are not the same but maybe that is the point.  Times change and we can be persuaded to do the right thing in the right way.

A Liberal Town Built Around Confederate Generals Rethinks Its Identity

In Lexington, Va., where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are buried, people are reassessing the town’s ties to a legacy that symbolizes slavery and oppression.

By Reid J. Epstein
The New York Times
July 26, 2020

LEXINGTON, Va. — It’s a short drive in Lexington from a home on Confederate Circle past the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery and over to the Robert E. Lee Hotel, where locals like to stop for a drink.

There may be tourists there looking for directions to the Lee Chapel, or one of the two Stonewall Jackson statues in town. They might see a Washington and Lee University student paddling a canoe down the Maury River, named for the Confederate oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury.

If medical treatment is needed, residents can head to the Stonewall Jackson Hospital. For groceries, there’s a Food Lion at Stonewall Square, which isn’t far from Rebel Ridge Road, just up the way from Stonewall Street and Jackson Avenue.

For 150 years Lexington, a picturesque city nestled in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, has been known to the outside world as the final resting place of Lee, the Confederacy’s commanding general during the Civil War, and Jackson, whom Lee referred to as his “right arm.” They form the basis of a daily existence here that has long been tethered to the iconography of the Civil War and its two most famous Confederate generals, whose legacy has seeped into the town’s culture like the July humidity.

But Lexington is no longer a bastion of conservatism. It is a liberal college town of about 7,000 people that voted 60 percent for Hillary Clinton four years ago, and in 2018 gave 70 percent of its vote to the Democratic Senate candidate, Tim Kaine. Black Lives Matter signs dot the windows of downtown stores, and residents haven’t backed a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan.

These dueling sensibilities place Lexington at particularly delicate intersection of the national debate over Confederate monuments and emblems. As Americans protesting racial injustice have torn down statues and memorials to Confederates, the town finds itself reassessing its identity, divided between the growing imperative to eradicate symbols of slavery and decades of cultural and economic ties to the Confederates who fought to preserve it.

“When you’re surrounded by all of the symbols, it just is a way of life,” said Marilyn Alexander, 67, the lone Black member of the City Council. “It was not until recently that there was a realization for me that there was such an outcry from the community, that felt these symbols and signs needed to come down or be changed.”

City Council meetings in July have been almost entirely devoted to the question of the city-owned cemetery named for Jackson; one session lasted five hours, ending with a unanimous after-midnight vote to remove signs bearing Jackson’s name. A second meeting began with pleas from residents to put the signs back up. The council plans a session on Friday to discuss new names, with a vote possible in September.

“I long for the days of people complaining about potholes and not heritage,” said Lexington’s mayor, Frank Friedman.

Ms. Alexander said it had never occurred to her to propose taking Jackson’s name off the cemetery, believing that it would have no support from white Lexingtonians. “Most of my life I have come to realize that these are things that have just been, this is the way it is and this is the way it’s always going to be,” she said.

For decades, the names of Lexington’s Confederate forebears have mostly gone unchallenged. A 2011 City Council vote to forbid flying the Confederate flag on municipal flagpoles drew a lawsuit, eventually dismissed by a federal appeals court, from the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; until this spring no one had proposed removing Jackson’s name from the cemetery, where a towering statue of the general rises above his family plot.

At Washington and Lee, students’ degrees still come with portraits of its two namesakes, and at the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson taught before the war, first-year students are required to re-enact the 1864 Battle of New Market as Confederate soldiers.

Still, attitudes have started to change in recent years. Grace Episcopal Church downtown dropped Robert E. Lee from its name in 2017, and last year the local Boy Scout council changed its name from the Stonewall Jackson Area Council to the Virginia Headwaters Council.

Bigger changes are now afoot in town, which has a Black population of just under 9 percent. Carilion, the Roanoke, Va.-based health care conglomerate that owns the Stonewall Jackson Hospital, said Thursday that it would change the name to Rockbridge Community Hospital. Francesco Benincasa, whose family owns the Robert E. Lee Hotel, said Friday that it would be renamed “The Gin” starting next month.

“It’s a little hard to brand hospitality after generals,” Mr. Benincasa said in an interview.

Adama Kamara grew up in Lexington, attending preschool in a church named for Stonewall Jackson. A 2020 graduate of Emory University, in Atlanta, she had never protested the city’s Confederate memorials, but when the City Council met on July 2 to debate the cemetery’s name she called in via video conference.

“It’s not just the history that’s shameful, it’s the way the people are so committed to preserving it in this town,” she told city officials. “This preservation has caused me deep pain.”

Almost instantly, Ms. Kamara, 22, began receiving supportive text messages and emails from former classmates, teachers and longtime friends in town, people with whom she’d never before discussed the city’s Confederate forefathers. She and other young people, Lexington natives who’d gone away to college but returned during the coronavirus pandemic, began organizing to protest the city’s street names, statues and the local public school curriculum, which they said focused too much on lionizing local Confederate history at the expense of America’s Black experience.

“I don’t think we have ever been given the space to say we as Black people feel very uncomfortable about this,” Ms. Kamara said. “We have been silently thinking these things and silently compartmentalized this, but until we started hearing each other we had no idea that we all felt this way.”

It did not take long for resistance to removing Jackson’s name from the cemetery to grow.

Representative Ben Cline, a Republican who represents Lexington in Congress, wrote on Facebook: “I suppose they’ll rename it something like ‘Lexington Cemetery: Now with Surprise Inside!’ Or if they want to be more accurate, something like ‘Future Democrat Voter Quarry.’” His office did not respond to phone calls, emails or text messages seeking an interview.

Heather Hopkins Barone, a local marketer, wrote to the City Council that she had more than 2,000 names on a petition opposing the change.

“You cannot erase history because a few people are offended,” she wrote in the letter that she also shared on a Facebook page devoted to local affairs. “The affect that it will also have on the tourism industry and the Alumni will destroy this town.”

Tourism is the biggest component of the city’s revenues after property taxes, and the biggest economic drivers are the two universities, which are inextricably linked to Lee and Jackson.

In a house two blocks from a downtown shopping strip that includes the Red Hen — a restaurant briefly famous for refusing to serve then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2018 — Ellen Darlene Bane, 64, flies three flags: The Confederate battle flag, a flag that combines the Confederate emblem with the Virginia state seal and the yellow Gadsden flag that’s become associated with the Tea Party.

Ms. Bane, who lives across the street from a Black church, the Gospel Way Church of God in Christ, said she began flying the flags six years ago and has never received a complaint. She called the movement to remove Lee and Jackson’s names “crap” and predicted escalating racial tensions in Lexington.

“Everybody’s getting racist,” she said. “It’s going to be the Blacks against the whites.”

Lexington’s universities are facing their own reckoning. At Washington and Lee, 79 percent of the faculty voted on July 6 to strip Lee’s name from the school, prompting the board of trustees to announce “a thoughtful and deliberative process” to examine Lee’s legacy.

One of the leading proponents of keeping the Lee name is Lucas E. Morel, an Abraham Lincoln scholar who is chairman of the politics department. He argued that the name honors Lee’s contributions to the school — he led its revival after the war — without making a judgment about his leadership of the Confederate army.

“We can separate Lee’s generalship of the Confederacy and his symbolism as patron saint of the Lost Cause from his laudable contribution to the university,” Professor Morel said. “To remove Lee’s name is to say, ‘Thank you for the gift of saving this college, but we don’t appreciate that contribution to such an extent that we think we should continue to honor you.’’’

At the Virginia Military Institute, until 2015 all students were required to salute the statue of Jackson when passing it. A public university, the school has retained its conservative politics, well after the Supreme Court ordered it to admit women in 1996.

But Virginia’s state politics, which govern the school, have changed. Democrats control the state legislature. Gov. Ralph Northam, a 1981 V.M.I. graduate who is working to take down state-owned Confederate monuments, “has confidence that V.M.I.’s Board of Visitors will do the right thing,” said his spokesman, Grant Neely.

Jennifer Carroll Foy, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who in 2003 was among the first group of Black women to graduate from V.M.I., said the Jackson statue should be moved to a museum.

“We can’t say in Virginia that we’re open for business but we’re closed to diversity and inclusion,” said Ms. Foy, who is now running for governor. “No child looks at a Confederate monument and feels inspired.”

David Sigler, a City Council member who graduated from Washington and Lee and works as the financial aid director at V.M.I., said renaming the Stonewall Jackson Cemetery ought to be the first move to pivot the town’s identity away from its Confederate past.

“Our small business owners, they have products to sell, meals to prepare, they want their tables filled in their restaurants,” he said. “I will feel bad if they lose one customer because we renamed the cemetery. But I think we might gain two customers for every one we might lose in the long run if we’re not so one-dimensional.”

Streets of Blood

To truly understand the South you would have to be a combined Anthropologist, Sociologist, Theologian and Economist.  The South post Civil War failed at Reconstruction and in turn faced a series of economic boycotts over the years that began with the great migration by many Southern Black faces to the North that promised work.  The South remained largely agrarian  and in turn lost significant power over time Legislatively but thanks to the sheer numbers of folks who have remained has made the region one of political import.  But what is more important is that if one recalls the South was the site of many battles in the American Revolution, which residents of South Carolina never fail to mention, that civil war thing yes, but that history of their role in securing American’s independence is something that of which they are resolutely proud of.  The Citadel sits in Charleston and is the school of legacy and in turn demonstrates that while the northern schools, such as West Point, get the attention the reality is that the South has been driven economically by their large numbers enlisted in the military.  It is the most significant institution next to schools of which again the South take great pride in, and they do that through college sports.  And it is not without its own history of abuse and scandal. But hey that is what makes you tough right.  Police, Warrior, Cop.

After time the South started to invite foreign businesses to set up shop, they created right to work laws, like their endless pursuit of religious freedom attests that is the most significant ways the South has come to rise again in America.  The Southern migration of many Black elite to rebuild and rebrand Atlanta gave the area a cache that had been largely resigned to the trash heap of Hee Haw and the Beverly Hillbillies and then came Medea.  Part satire, part honorarium, it brought the new money to the new faces of color that had for decades known how to put assess in seats and find white audiences to black theaters. And then of course sports.  You know the great equalizer until that black fist is raised or a knee bent.  But the greatest equalizer was and frankly is the Military.  One can note all the significant faces whoop I mean face of color in Colin Powell who attained one of the most respected places at the table of the White House until a young man named Obama took the next higher seat.  And again that was a way for everyone to say, “See we are not racist.”  What.ever.

Meanwhile the South did not change, did not evolve at all in fact it doubled down on the hate laws. They carefully took voting rights away, re-examined civil rights and directed it towards another group, the Gay community and in turn under religious freedom ensured that hospitals or Planned Parenthood would be denied access and availability to any and all options when it came to family planning. They did the same for education, embracing charters and testing and other means to break any concept of public and equal education established in Brown, a color that is not just one in the Crayola box.  The South still had statues, markers and other symbols scattered throughout the cities and towns that were somehow equal notes about people, places and things that demonstrated growth and evolution. What.ever. Meanwhile the oppressive laws and legislative acts say otherwise

I toured the South and spoke and visited many sites of note.  I elected to avoid Alabama given their current attempt to destroy women’s right to choose but I am still planning to go.  As a result of my “boycott” I  have not seen the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery and we know now it is about 1,000 names light as to number actually killed during that time. But then again the South numbers are not their best suit.   It is like today when we speak of George Floyd we are forgetting the seventy or more that in the prior year said variations of “I can’t breathe.”  They too were smothered to death at the hands of the Police, another protected class under the new name, “First Responders” that give cache and honor to a job that includes murder.  For anyone who chokes the life out of someone and does so with deliberation is a murderer.  Hard words but we give a pass to those who wear a uniform for they do so to save our country, to protect and serve and whatever other bullshit we like to say when we excuse the accuser.

So in the last decade the South rose again, the schools, the football, the basketball and their endless parade of flags to note that every single elected official were largely white men with dubious histories regarding civil rights and often relegated as public jokes. But meanwhile they made powerful allies and friends and they stay very much elected in office without issue or scandal.  Well some get busted and yet they are back again and again as the South is tribal, forgiving their own and seeing the “other” the “outsider” with suspicion and doubt. Well that is until a check is offered be it at the fund raiser or the church plate it is in that God We Trust.

Today Mississippi, the poorest state in the Southern union finally a century later removed the Confederate flag from their state flag. Tennessee which has resisted any call to remove the head of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forest, statue from the Capital may do so. In fact, the Tennessee state Legislature passed a law when the City of Memphis sold a park with another absurd Confederate statue to a private investor who promptly removed the work of “art” and then deeded the land back to the city as a gift. The white powers that be immediately made that illegal and the statues stayed in place all of this after a young white woman, Heather Heyer, died in  Charlottesville against others fought those wanting to remove one from public land.   They were not residents from there, but they felt that vested in a statue that has nothing to do with their own history other that being one of a racist white man, they were willing to kill people to do so.   And finally Facebook today says, whoops sorry about giving them a forum.  How many deaths in the streets does it take?

Speaking of Facebook…. how many Russian trolls will it take to topple it? NONE.

This week it has been revealed that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers, and that this might have been going on during the Obama Administration is not a message lost on me, as Obama reneged on that promise to get us out and failed to.   But given what you will read later on it makes sense.  But then again unlike the idiot in the White House I read.  This war was about rage and honor and I get it as I can walk out my door and see in my backyard the tower that replaced the two ripped out of the skies.  I can see memorial after memorial here in Jersey City and in NYC about that day.  There is no way to ever explain that rage and loss that included many “first responders” many whom did not need to die had they had better communication and linked lines that would have allowed them to know what was coming.  And again that lays as the hands and feet of another idiot in the Trump orbit and yet in those days he was America’s Mayor.  Wow we could not do worse.  More deaths in streets and yet the powerful still go on being powerful.  His best friend, Bernard Kerik, was recently pardoned by Trump, and Trumps pardons go on to those who least deserve them but then again the powerful never get justice in the same way the rest do.

Another Trump pardon was an Army Sergeant who committed murder, or what we call War Crimes. War crimes that have been going on since WWII and we have spent much of history trying to call to Justice those in power who perpetuated them.  Sometimes it works but then again Stalin never faced a Jury nor will Putin.  Nor will any Saudi Prince for their own crimes against America that fateful day nor for any in the most recent day.  They will go on with life as usual as blood washes away quit easily when you have the money to make it so.

This is the link to the story of Sergeant Lorance ,who had been in command of 1st Platoon for only three days in Afghanistan; however,  in that short span of time he averaged a war crime a day.  Remember Police kill an average of 3 a day in America.  a military jury found.  The day before he was dismissed, he ordered his troops to open fire on three Afghan men standing by a motorcycle on the side of the road who he said posed a threat. His actions led to a 19-year prison sentence.  He served six years and then Trump made him a hero.  Well Chauvin may end up with the same if Trump remains in office, just a thought.

What I want to remind anyone is that no one acts alone.  That Police have accomplices and they are partners in crime and they too walk away or not as again this act on Mr. Floyd was not the first and certainly not the last until it is.  The reality is that for those who choose to not or find themselves unwitting aids to one who has the power and authority to damage their lives if not actually enable their lives to end, it is a precarious journey.  And I urge you to read the stories of the men who now see their former colleague walk free as if nothing he did wrong. The same goes for those who were victims of crimes, of sexual assaults and other serious matters where the laws seem to favor the accused and in turn enable them to walk out the door, if they ever even get inside in the first place.

In my case I hold two men responsible for what happened to me, two white men, two Lawyers, Ted Vosk and Kevin Trombold, as the ones who did more damage to me than my date Char ever did as he never finished the job, but they did their best to do so. To the massive staff at Harborview Hospital, their role cannot be ignored as they allowed me to wander the streets for a week without anyone caring for me putting me further at risk and perhaps even allowing me to invite the maniac back into my home. To them I wish them a special place in hell.  And this also goes to the ones who have done this to others, the professionals with whom we entrust to serve, to protect, to heal, to make a life better and as this pandemic has proven they are not capable nor truly able to do so. This is America, in God We Trust, and by that I mean the God of the word on the dollar.  We trust and respect no other and those uniforms that are worn be it of Police, Military, Fire, EMT, Doctor, Nurse or the Robes in court they are not there for the citizens of the country they are there for their own self interest.  They can go fuck themselves.   We have the power in number and we refuse for whatever reason or belief to vote, to engage, to read, and to know. And because of that our streets run with blood.

Markers Do Not Suffice

When I first moved to Nashville in June of 2016, I was optimistic.  I wanted to leave the trauma of Seattle behind, begin restoration of my deteriorating teeth and maybe just maybe find a home.  By the end of 2019 I could not wait to leave and my subsequent trips in 2020 were marked by a Tornado and by Covid firmly convincing me that leaving there was the best thing I could have ever done.

Three weeks into living in Nashville I had an exchange waiting for Thai food at one of the supposed great places in Nashville that much like the rest of the recommendations and promises were just that false and insincere, but there I met a transplant from New York who said to me as we got our food and began to part, “You will not be here four years from now.”  I laughed and thought he may be wrong or right it was early days yet and like that encounter I never set foot in that restaurant again nor  ever encountered him again either.  And that was like many of my encounters in Nashville, fleeting, frustrating, hopeful and downright bleak.   The few that I met towards the end of my time there I have never spoken to again, not an email to inquire about my health, my well being or anything about my state of mind during this perhaps the most stressful one anyone anywhere is experiencing.   And while I think that is actually quite commonplace anywhere else I find it most telling that in the buckle of the belt of the bible belting South, Nashville prides itself on its friendly outgoing nature.  As I look back that myth of hospitality can go the way of the wind along with other such fraudulent proclamations as Southern Belle and Gentlemen.  The women I met were cum dumpster and there was never a Gentleman within Covid spitting yards that ever encountered.  My favorite still was the Doctor from Vanderbilt who hit on me in my home, while assessing the value of my belongings and telling me his wife would not care if he had a lover.  Really? What he thought I thought of that was not of import, and that was the reality of the men in Nashville, they had no interest in what any woman thought as well again, we are just cum dumpsters.

I walked a great deal in Nashville being carless and knew the city better than some of the locals and clearly more than most of the transplants who relocated there as it was the “it” city with jobs aplenty for anyone willing to “work hard.” Ah yes another myth that lends itself to the concept of American Exceptionalism. Well we have certainly found that not to be true haven’t we? And on many street corners, buildings and parks there were markers that noted the significance of that place in history in relationship to Nashville.  While the original Woolworths stood untouched, the original Department Store once central to the core of the city stood now as lofts and the rest of the city in transition from a little big town to a bigger little town the markers there stood as well.  I doubt one single person ever read them and at times I used to think of them as warnings that if you too stayed too long you may end up having one placed to note your irrelevance.  My favorite were two markers noting the former location of two Gay bars run by black residents that were eventually burned to the ground and now a parking lot sits with a fake prohibition saloon talking its place.  Really two gay bars? The ones they had were largely marginalized and the others were strictly for Bridezillas and hardly a welcoming place for anyone in search of community.  In fact one of the ones by my home where I spent my first Pride in Nashville is now gone, the other still there I am sure hidden from view.  I went a few times and never felt welcomed there either. And that marked my time in Nashville, feeling very unwelcome.

It was not until I left that I understood the history and reasoning behind the South that they have a Code of Honor and a misplaced sense of history that again revolves around religion as they are the “chosen people.”  But there are other myths about the South and war that dominate history and in turn often are overlooked as to why it happened and why the South cling to the ideals that are now over 150 years old. But in the South that was not the first war they fought and that link to the Revolution plays a great deal in determining the cultural mindset and core values prevalent in the South and nowhere does it seem to be finally having a reckoning as it is today.  Churches were bombed, children killed, adults killed and beaten. Homes and towns set afire, men and women killed in their homes all of it under the fear of civil rights and equality and today of all day’s the awakening came at the death of a man who lived in all places the North.  So if one of the 1000’s that die at the hands of Police every year for the past five years (if not for many more)  this one was not in vain and he will never have a marker in any of cities that have many about those who walked, who sat in, who protested and who died by mobs for their deaths will be mentioned in passing in books unread or ignored like the signs as they always have.

When I read about how American’s attitudes were changing, my first thought was: What took you the fuck so long?   Again me being a history teacher, child of first born Immigrant and another the child of one during WWII where the horrors of not being “pure white” or chosen as the Japanese believed perhaps may have something to do with my “awakening” from birth.  But then time passes and the people in your life are reflections of you and your beliefs, its a nice bubblelator which allows a sense of moral and intellectual superiority.   Then I encountered first hand the system of justice and the medical industrial complex in ways that we think do not exist or do but that it was rare and on most cases deserved. Really? Then the idea of innocent until proven guilty was proven to me first hand that is another myth on the ever increasing list of ones associated with equality and democracy.  The Teacher of history got schooled real fast.  I began to see up front the absurdity, then I began to read and research all the varying injustices that plague the American Judicial system. It is one thing to be against Capital Punishment it is another to realize how prevalent it is and how random it is performed  until you live somewhere where it is openly practiced and done regardless of how the rest of America sees it.  And that is when I learned in Tennessee that despite all the Churches and Bibles in hand that the South sees the world different.  That Christianity is a dish served along side biscuits and sweet tea, all with a smile and a dose of passive aggressiveness.  And then once I saw that ugly in my face I had to examine myself and my bubble in hard light.  And yes Seattle is not better, not worse it just prefers coffee over tea.  The schools are horrific, racist, segregated, the people elitist and white and money is the one shared value that crosses the Mason-Dixon line in perfection.   Where Women are fat, funky and hairy in Seattle, the Southern woman is smooth, slick, stupid and can suck cock better than any sex worker.  Are not all women? But not the Belle, as they are Ladies, but they are too they just don’t have conventional sex until marriage. And the men with all their faux demeanors from those in Seattle who claim to be “Feminists”  are just raging assholes, the difference in Nashville they are just less educated.  And when you realize how similar they are you realize that America has not changed one minute over the decades of protest, of laws and wars and promises to be better, to do better.  We are all abused spouses who just take it and stay with regardless of what end of the fist you are on.  We have not changed one iota when it comes to the sexes and their roles and identities in the 21st Century.

Look at “social” media, the endless bullying, the obsession with “Karen’s” as representation of all things racist. Funny all women, all the time and not a man among them except unless in the company of a Karen.  Wow, outing, demeaning and shaming is a pass time shared now across the races.  Fuck you, no fuck you.  Fuck you again and lather, rinse, repeat.  Do you feel better about yourself? I did not when I would walk into every school and hate myself at the end of the day subjecting myself to kids so angry so troubled that I was in denial about how bad it was and this was in Seattle.  There were no fewer sexual assaults, scandals, shootings and violence, it was just swaddled in a liberal ethos and then I went to Nashville to get the pathos.  I truly hated myself there. As it was there I truly saw the history of America and how that became the present. Again, lather, rinse, repeat.  The legacy of a black community in Tulsa came to light over Trump’s visit and the date that was marked in Texas history called Juneteenth.  Again not a date of note, now today it is one of import, yes a day that finally someone told the truth that the Slaves were freed.  A day in Texas freeing those already free. And this brings me to Tulsa, not the only black community destroyed by angry white mobs – Springfield, Slocum, Colfax, Wilmington,  Elaine, and Rosewood.  Even Atlanta had burned.  So will these other towns be forgotten like the thousands of others killed before Mr. Floyd?  People do die and they are murdered and often forgotten with no marker to designate their death or even their life.

I studied history too long and with the idea of teaching others about the legacy of this place, some their only home, some their new home but the idea to know where you came from can tell you where you are going is one I have never lost be it personally or professionally.  That said I realize that we all will have left is a marker with our identity as to how it is seen by others, Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter.  For some we will have nothing but time on earth. But walk through a graveyard and read them and what does it tell you about them? Not much as a life cannot be placed on a marker and when I read those in the South I knew that it was just one part of a story created by the people who decide who gets them and why.  Be it guilt, be it significance, be it of import it says nothing about anyone or how they got there and more importantly why.   No marker will ever suffice to replace the narrative that is a life.  And in reality this applies to the Statues that are being torn down at a rapid clip. There is little there to even tell you who they were that deserved the mention and who paid for it, approved it why it is there, and they have been ignored there for decades.  No one cared until they did and then again someone died, a woman, over tearing one down.  Really?  Is there a marker there now marking her death or life and why it happened? So keep on keeping on with your hateful dog piling, holding, mocking those whom you do not agree, you do not know but you feel morally superior in doing so. Funny I bet those who destroyed lives and towns felt the same way.  See we share more then we think and that is what is really fucking scary.  Its how I felt in Nashville, afraid and angry.  I don’t live there anymore and there will never be a marker acknowledging that and for that it is one thing I am glad of.   Nothing will change in Nashville and that much I know but I am not the only one. As I said at the top of this I left before a Tornado ripped up North Nashville, once again reminding everyone that nothing is permanent and it all returns to the land.  Irony that for black faces that seems to be a consistent, so perhaps this may be different.  But again we have done this dance before. Don’t underestimate being angry and afraid.

History Repeats Itself in North Nashville

Fifty years after I-40’s construction, a cycle of poverty and displacement churns again in 37208
Steven Hale | Nashville Scene
Jun 7, 2018 5 AM

By the time you read this, Lashananda Kee will have left.

The house on the 1500 block of 14th Avenue North where she has lived with her children and grandchildren is being sold out from under them, and they were the last ones to know it.

“We didn’t even know that the landlord was selling the house,” says Kee, who is 39. She’s sitting on her front stoop holding an unlit cigarette as the afternoon sun beats down on North Nashville. Her grandson, 3-year-old Jeremiah, occasionally peeks out the front door and waves.

“He’s been selling this house since September, and we just found out in December, around Christmastime, when we got a whole lot of people coming in and out of our house talking about how he was selling the house. We didn’t know nothing about it.”

The matter ended up in court, she says, and a judge gave the family two months to leave. On this afternoon, just days before the May 25 deadline, the house is nearly empty. Inside, part of the hallway ceiling is caving in — something Kee says her landlord hasn’t bothered to address. Online listings market the house as suitable for gutting or tearing down. But at $675 a month, it was a place Kee could afford while living on government assistance — although toward the end of the month she has to ask around for help feeding the kids. Now she’s moving the family to Dothan, Ala.

“I’m from Nashville, Tennessee,” says Kee. “I don’t know anything about Dothan. I just found somewhere cheaper where I can live and won’t get thrown out of my house. Nashville, for a two-bedroom, it’s $1,200 dollars.”

372080061Lashananda Kee with daughter Zaquita and grandchildren Jeremiah, Marcus and Quinton outside their home on 14th Avenue NorthPhoto: Daniel MeigsKee grew up in this area, like her mother and her mother’s mother. Along with her two youngest children — a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old — she also has custody of her 22-year-old daughter’s four children, all of them 10 or younger. She doesn’t know the 22-year-old’s whereabouts anymore.

“She’s on drugs so bad, I don’t know where she is,” Kee says.

The neighborhood is changing in some ways, but in other ways, she says, it’s not so different from how it was when she was coming up. Kee says she’s seen people killed, shot at and, in one instance, “a woman get her head busted with a brick over drugs.”

This is 37208, the heart of historically black North Nashville and a community in which Nashville’s proud progress has often had a poisonous side. The local and federal government’s treatment of North Nashville for at least a century has ranged from neglect to outright racist hostility. Around 50 years ago, the construction of Interstate 40 displaced more than a thousand black residents, destroyed a business and cultural district on Jefferson Street that was thriving against all odds, and slashed across the neighborhood of the 37208 ZIP code, cutting it in half.

Now, some 150 years after freed slaves began settling here, the cycle of displacement is churning again. Gentrification driven by Nashville’s ascendancy as a New South metropolis is uprooting scores of black families and sending shock waves through a community that has rarely known stability. All the while, the poisoned tree has borne fruit. North Nashville is plagued by a lack of opportunity and scant public investment, and alongside its rich cultural history is a history of poverty, crime, violence, aggressive policing and mass incarceration. A Brookings Institution study released in March looking at people born between 1980 and 1986 found that in the 37208 ZIP code, 1 out of every 7 people of that generation found themselves imprisoned in their 30s. That’s the highest rate in the country.

From her stoop, Kee points up and down the street at houses that have been sold, the families who had been renting them put out with little warning.

“They’re pushing all the black people out and putting all the white people in, and it’s not fair. Y’all just pushing us out of our domain and where we live and what we know.”

Later, she adds, “I don’t think it’s fair, and something needs to be done about it, but who am I?”

South of the house that will be her home for just a few more days, past another home for sale and another new build, the street runs into a thicket of trees with the interstate looming on the other side.

The Rev. Ed Sanders says he “stopped in Nashville for two years, 45 years ago.”

Born and raised in Memphis, where he was pastored by famed civil rights leader James Lawson, Sanders left Tennessee for school but came to Nashville in the early 1970s to work at Fisk University. In 1981 he founded Metro Interdenominational Church, and he has spent the decades since leading his congregation and devoting himself to, among other things, providing care and services to people with HIV and AIDS.

The church still sits on Eleventh Avenue North where it was built almost 40 years ago, although it has recently gained some tall-and-skinny neighbors — trendy new homes in various stages of construction are visible from the church’s property. The memory of segregation is never far away. Buena Vista Park is adjacent to the church, but in the neighborhood it’s known as White City Park. City leaders closed its public pool in the 1960s rather than being forced to allow African-Americans to swim in it.

On a rainy May morning, Sanders is sitting in the empty sanctuary, talking about America’s oldest disease, racism. He speaks in a deep voice, the kind that carries wisdom picked up over decades.

“The metaphor that I use in relationship to what has happened to this community is very much one that I relate to how HIV works,” he says. “If you think of it in terms of HIV — and I want to call the virus racism, classism — if you end up being infected by the virus, if it goes untreated, then that’s when it can evolve to where you have AIDS. When you get AIDS, what that means is that your immune system has become so compromised that it makes you vulnerable to opportunistic diseases that otherwise you would never be vulnerable to. I often describe what’s going on with gentrification exactly that way. The immune system of our communities was undermined and destroyed.”

That diagnosis can be made quite convincingly, even without reference to slavery and the racist terrorism that followed its abolition. Like black communities in cities across the country, starting in the 1930s, North Nashville was subject to a racist housing policy that would later become known as “redlining.” So-called “security maps” adopted by the Federal Housing Administration color-coded neighborhoods, with red representing areas that were “hazardous” for lenders. These areas were almost invariably poor and black. The practice meant not only that African-Americans were largely excluded from homeownership and the chance to accumulate wealth through it, but also that any investment in their neighborhoods was discouraged by the FHA — the very agency that could ensure it.

We are still living in the society that those old redlining maps helped shape. In 2017, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago released an analysis of the 1930s maps showing that lower-graded neighborhoods experienced an increase in racial segregation that began to decline as late as 1970. In lower-graded areas, they also found evidence of a decline in home ownership, house values and credit scores that “persists today.”

Holc ScanA “security map” of Nashville produced by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation ca. 1935https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/But even as redlining and Jim Crow laws waged war on the economic health and physical well-being of African-Americans, the main thoroughfare in North Nashville became a vibrant street that African-Americans in Nashville could proudly call their own.

“Jefferson Street was something very special in the middle of Jim Crow,” says Dr. Learotha Williams, an associate professor of African-American and public history at Tennessee State University, who runs the North Nashville Heritage Project. “But it wasn’t like these folks had a choice, because this was all that they had. So they made it something almost magical.”

Some of that magic is commemorated at Jefferson Street Sound, Lorenzo Washington’s “mini-museum” of the street’s history. Inside an unassuming white house near the intersection of Jefferson and 21st Avenue North, Washington preserves the memory of a strip that sizzled with R&B and jazz music emanating from clubs like the Del Morocco and Club Baron — clubs that hosted artists like Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Little Richard and Marion James. Washington laughs as he recalls how he met his first wife during the street’s heyday: She and some friends were walking down Jefferson, trying to thumb a ride to the Del Morocco, and he picked them up.

An essay on the history of Jefferson Street written by Fisk University professor and Tennessee Historical Commission chair Reavis Mitchell Jr. describes how the street evolved. What was once a wagon road on which newly freed African-American women and children could be seen walking to a so-called “contraband camp” at Fort Gillem — the site where Fisk would later be established — became a thriving business and entertainment district.

“In the age of Jim Crow, black Nashvillians filled the Ritz Theater to enjoy first release movies, where they were free to enter through the front door and sit in the main audience,” writes Mitchell.

The street also had department stores operated by Jewish merchants, and even some with integrated staffs.

“The life-affirming bustle along Jefferson Street flowed through bakeries, hardware stores, service or gasoline stations, dry cleaning establishments (some of which offered made-to-order men’s apparel), insurance agencies, and shoe shops,” Mitchell writes.

The corridor was, and still is, home to African-American colleges like Meharry Medical College, what would become Tennessee State University and Fisk University, the latter of which would provide an academic home for figures like the writer and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, pioneering investigative journalist Ida B. Wells and civil rights leaders like Diane Nash and John Lewis.

At the same time, white political leaders were becoming increasingly preoccupied with eliminating urban “blight.” In Nashville, federally backed urban renewal projects — a redevelopment campaign that writer James Baldwin famously referred to as “Negro removal” — and the ostensibly anti-poverty Model Cities program sparked political and legal resistance from African-American communities.

But the cataclysmic event for North Nashville was the construction of I-40. It ripped through the 37208 ZIP code as the result of a deliberate calculation that black neighborhoods — and the culture and community within them — were more disposable than white enclaves. This was not unique to Nashville. In his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein writes that interstate construction was a popular slum-clearance tactic. He quotes Alfred Johnson, a leading lobbyist involved in the writing of the 1956 Federal Highway Act, recalling that some local government officials “expressed the view in the mid-1950s that the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘niggertown.’ ”

Discussion of potential interstate routes across Tennessee began in the 1940s and continued through the ’50s and ’60s. In his book The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City, historian Benjamin Houston writes that one possible I-40 route was abandoned because it veered too close to Belle Meade, the tony suburban home of the city’s white elite, and threatened Vanderbilt University and Baptist Hospital. Another route that followed Charlotte Pike was more appealing, Houston writes, because it avoided Centennial Park and Baptist Hospital and allowed for the use of “the widened streets as physical dividers between white and black neighborhoods, a tactic frequently employed at the time in Nashville and elsewhere.”

That route gained momentum despite some logistical and engineering concerns. Then something changed. Houston writes that what happened next is “murky,” but that at some point in 1955 or 1956, a new route was chosen — it would parallel Charlotte before making a sharp turn near 28th Avenue and tearing into North Nashville.

“None of the plans nor their implications were discussed with local residents, even though the route would virtually disembowel North Nashville,” Houston writes.

By 1967, a largely African-American 40-member group of community leaders called the I-40 Steering Committee had formed to fight the route. They argued that the interstate would isolate many black-owned businesses and destroy many others, and also displace residents. They said a shadowy planning process had prevented affected communities from knowing the plans until it was too late. The I-40 Steering Committee filed suit over the route in 1968, represented by attorneys Avon Williams and Z. Alexander Looby — eight years earlier Looby’s house on Meharry Boulevard had been bombed by segregationists. Among the people named in the suit was then-Mayor Beverly Briley, who had been elected in 1963 and would serve until 1975.

White leaders were largely dismissive of the group’s concerns. Sam Fleming, the president of Third National Bank at the time, urged the completion of the interstate. Interviewed by The Tennessean in January 1968, while standing next to black real estate developer Inman Otey, Fleming said, “I think that one of the great things about Nashville is that we always have known that the two races can work together.

“Working together, however, does not include the indulgence of whims that might delay by a year or more the completion of I-40’s route through the city,” he added.

The steering committee took its fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where its complaints were ultimately rejected. But the group’s warnings proved prescient. According to Metro figures, 1,400 Nashvillians were displaced by the construction of I-40 and I-265 (which would become I-65). Houston writes that “the two-and-a-half-mile stretch of interstate would demolish a hundred square blocks” and lead to “the demolition of approximately 650 homes and 27 apartment buildings.” According to the Tennessee State Museum, the value of remaining housing dropped more than 30 percent.

When the Rev. Ed Sanders got to Nashville in 1972, he says “the psychological scar, the community scar, the cultural scar was still very real.” And for many in the community, it still is.

When the Scene mentions I-40 while talking by phone to 93-year-old Evelyn Suggs, a longtime resident of the area, she interjects.

“I was involved in it and want to forget it,” she says. “It was terrible. I had to fight like hell.”

Age hasn’t diminished the fire in Suggs’ voice. She says she wishes she could talk longer about the subject, but she’s overseeing a roofing project at property she owns near Jefferson Street. As old newspaper clippings show, she did fight like hell, and she extracted one of the few concessions that highway planners made to the neighborhood. At one point, the interstate plan didn’t even include an exit in North Nashville, adding insult to injury. But Suggs, armed with education in history and political science and her own studies at the public library, gave them hell until they relented.

After she confronted a visiting representative from the federal government at a public meeting, she says, he looked over to the project engineers and told them bluntly to “put the exit where she wants it.” Says Suggs, the Jefferson Street exit, No. 207, is her exit. It comes off the highway right near Albion Street, where she lives.

“I tell you, we had to fight every step of the way,” she says.

In 2012, in collaboration with the Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership and Tennessee State University, among others, the city unveiled Gateway to Heritage Plaza at the I-40 underpass near the Jefferson Street exit. Columns beneath the interstate feature pictures and stories of people and events that, as a Metro press release put it, “have contributed to Jefferson Street’s unique place in history.”

Crystal deGregory is a scholar of black activism and historically black colleges and universities who lived in Nashville for nearly 20 years, earning history and education degrees from Vanderbilt, Tennessee State and Fisk before becoming the director of Kentucky State University’s Atwood Institute for Race, Education and the Democratic Ideal last year. She calls Gateway to Heritage Plaza lipstick on a pig.

“The history of black Nashville is relegated to the underpass of the interstate that destroyed the community,” she says. “And we’re supposed to be happy about that!”

Mindy Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at The New School in New York, has coined a term for the unique trauma people experience after mass-displacement events like the ones that occurred in North Nashville in the mid-20th century. She calls it “root shock.” Simply put, it is the result of seeing one’s environment devastated — whether through natural disaster, government policy or gentrification — and it is an experience she believes is underestimated.

“Buildings and neighborhoods and nations are insinuated into us by life; we are not, as we like to think, independent of them,” Fullilove writes in her 2004 book Root Shock. “We are more like Siamese twins, conjoined to the locations of our daily life, such that our emotions flow through places, just as blood flows through two interdependent people. We can, indeed, separate from our places, but it is an operation that is best done with care.”

An underlying story in the history of North Nashville over the past century is the ripping away — maliciously at times, recklessly at others — of black people’s “places.” Their “life world,” as Fullilove puts it.

“There are some things that evolved over generations in this community that are now lost,” says Sanders of Metro Interdenominational Church. “And there’s no clear evidence of how they’ll be recovered.”

He continues: “The question that people put to me sometimes when I’m very critical of what I see, they’ll say, ‘Well, what did you want, did you want it to stay a slum, did you want it to stay where things weren’t developed?’ I say, ‘No, I wanted to see it developed, but I wanted to see it developed in a way that was by and in the interests of the people who had established community there before.”

Black places and black people are disappearing again in North Nashville, demolished by development, raptured away by mass incarceration or in many cases, displaced amid gentrification. In December, The Tennessean published an analysis of new census data that showed a number of historically African-American neighborhoods had seen significant declines in their black populations over the past decade. In North Nashville, the black population dropped from 60 percent to 38 percent — the largest drop in the county.

Sekou Franklin, a Middle Tennessee State University professor and community activist, lives in 37208. The gentrification of this historically black community, he notes, has been enabled by some well-meaning black leaders who have backed pro-growth policies that haven’t resulted in equitable benefits for black Nashvillians.

“My neighborhood was historically a working-class black community, probably 95 percent,” says Sekou. “With gentrification, displacement taking place, probably greater than 50 percent of the neighborhood has flipped over or is on its way to flipping over.”

The influx of developers and home-flippers has acted as a new interstate, chewing up the vulnerable and putting immense pressure on everyone else. Franklin says that as a middle-class family with education and some good luck, he and his wife and two daughters have been able to survive the tidal wave. But the calls and letters asking him to sell his home for well below market value number near 100 at this point, he says. It’s much harder for some of his neighbors who are renters, living on a tighter budget or possibly experiencing a personal tragedy of some sort. Sekou says he knows of at least four cases in which a renter has been pushed out — one had been living there for 30 years.

When Learotha Williams first moved to Nashville, he put out a call for residents to take pictures of the built environment. He knew much of what he saw in the community even 10 years ago wouldn’t last long.

“It’s going to look completely different, it’s going to have a new identity,” William says. “And I’m cognizant of the fact that neighborhoods are like people in many ways — they’re born, they mature, and then they die or they become something else. But I feel what we have going on in North Nashville is something akin to erasure, if you will.”

In the meantime, 37208 is home to evidence of both the new abundance Nashville so loves to celebrate and the suffering it seems intent on ignoring. The ZIP code contains the decrepit house being sold out from under Lashananda Kee and her family, as well as new seven-figure brownstones.

“Poverty has been a constant feature of this community, and it sort of drives me crazy when I think about it,” Williams says. “Things come out about Nashville being the ‘It City’ and all that, and that’s all well and good. But it’s very much like in the period of the 1890s in U.S. history, where you had great displays of wealth sitting right beside unimaginable poverty.”

Kentucky State’s deGregory speaks with resigned clarity when asked about the high poverty and incarceration rates in 37208.

“For better or worse, this will not be a reality for this ZIP code for much longer,” she says. “The displacement of black people in general, and the black poor in particular, from the heart of Nashville has been in motion for well over half a century, probably approaching closer to a century at this point.”

The dynamic is so familiar here, in this country and in this neighborhood, that the winners and losers seem almost predetermined.

“For [North Nashville’s] residents, it is the weight of history, and for developers and investors it’s the wind of history,” deGregory says. “The wind is at their backs.”

The Brookings Institution study released in March highlighted the unsurprising link between a youth spent in poor, racially segregated communities and future incarceration. It also suggested that interventions early in such children’s lives can make a real difference. And in light of those factors, there is reason for both distress and hope to be found in North Nashville’s schools. These schools have a chance to do right by a new generation of black Nashvillians growing up in the wake of the city’s past failures.

Despite the significant demographic change in 37208 over the past decade — and more than half a century after desegregation — the area’s schools remain made up almost entirely of African-American students. All four of the elementary schools in the ZIP code have student populations that have been more than 90 percent black in recent years. The area’s only high school, Pearl-Cohn — which takes half its name from an old black high school and half from an old white high school — is the same.

The work being done at Pearl-Cohn, led by both students and staff, is compelling, though it also reveals the trauma many of the school’s students have experienced. Sara Amos is a full-time social worker at the school who saw her position nearly eliminated during this year’s budget crisis. She devotes most of her time to counseling sessions with students struggling with depression, anxiety, anger issues and unresolved trauma.

“I would say about 80 percent of my caseload, something those students are dealing with is having lost someone to gun violence at some point in their lives,” Amos says.

Rasheedat Fetuga, founder of Gideon’s Army — a local nonprofit focused on policing and mass incarceration — is also a regular presence at the school, where she’s worked with students and the school to reduce suspensions and expulsions and to lead students in restorative practices. Recently, after 70 students signed up to be part of a leadership team that will work with the city on reducing youth violence, Pearl-Cohn’s principal, Dr. Sonya Stewart, gave Fetuga a full day with the students for training. They explored root causes and solutions to youth violence. Among the root causes students named, Fetuga says, were lack of resources, lack of jobs and the emotional toll of displacement and upheaval.

“There’s the physical act of being displaced, but then there’s also the emotional stress of watching your community be taken over by people who don’t really care about you, how it affects you or how it will affect your community in the long run,” says Fetuga. “They don’t care about the history, and especially in North Nashville, with the rich history, it is devastating. And they feel like the city could have done something and didn’t.”

A girls’ grief group Fetuga leads recently met with the family of Akilah DaSilva, a 23-year-old victim of the April Waffle House shooting.

“Theirs was a mass shooting, but [with] the kids it is constant,” Fetuga says. “It’s constant shootings, it’s constant killings. And they were able to speak to the DaSilva family and give them encouragement, even as children, because that’s something they’ve been going through for years.”

The ZIP code is also home to Buena Vista Elementary, which appeared on a list of the lowest-performing schools in the state earlier this year. To say the deck has been stacked against the school and its students is an understatement. Nearly all Buena Vista students are poor enough to meet the state’s requirements to receive school lunch for free, and 20 to 30 percent of its students are experiencing homelessness in one form or another. (It is the zoned school for the Nashville Rescue Mission women’s shelter.) The school also has high mobility rates, meaning many students either don’t start or don’t finish the academic year there.

Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell, who lives in the 37208 ZIP code and represents a portion of it on the council, started getting involved at the school when he moved to the neighborhood 10 years ago. He speaks with obvious frustration about the way Metro Nashville Public Schools officials have decreased funding to Buena Vista over the past several years. A “dollop” of extra funding through Metro’s Innovation Zone a few years back, he says, allowed the school to put apprentice teachers along with lead teachers in every classroom, among other things. But those resources have been drained after the Innovation Zone was effectively dismantled.

All the more upsetting to O’Connell is the brief appearance of a charter school a few blocks away that was around only long enough to harm Buena Vista. That school, Rocketship, opened at the beginning of the 2017-18 school year, lowering Buena Vista’s projected enrollment and further draining the school of funding. But Rocketship ultimately shut down before the school year was even finished.

Amid all this, the young boys and girls of Buena Vista show up to school with burdens far too big for a backpack. The school has a Community Achieves program (as does Pearl-Cohn), which provides wraparound services — that is, assistance in all areas of a student’s life — to students and their families. Megan McGuire, the school’s site coordinator for the initiative, works to lighten the load students carry to school. Working with community partners — churches, neighborhood associations, food pantries and local businesses — she makes sure students have clothes and food, even to get them through the weekend. McGuire says incarceration inevitably comes up when her students play Monopoly in her room with their lunch buddies. The game’s “Go to Jail” square prompts students to mention family members who have been locked up.

With community partners, McGuire stresses the difference between empathy and sympathy. She urges volunteers to participate not because they feel sorry for her students, but rather because her students deserve to be invested in.

“I don’t want our kids and families defined by the external forces in their life — their socioeconomic status, the incarceration rates,” she says. “That is a reality for this neighborhood, but I think our goal at this school is that you can lay that down when you walk in the door.”

But it’s summertime now, and the hot sun is beating down on Nashville, Tenn., 37208. The students at Buena Vista and Pearl-Cohn, the youth of North Nashville, are walking out into the world with the weight of history on their backs and a stiff wind in their face.

Southern Discomfort

 Sunday was a great day.  The Nashville Symphony, which never disappoints, presented an original commissioned work in addition to Beethoven’s 5th; Glorious is just one word that I can use to describe that afternoon of transcendent music that took me through a series of emotions over the course of two hours.

I had struggled with going literally renting a car and valet parking it to ensure I would go as the weather has been horrific with intense humidity and constant threat of downpours.  I don’t need an excuse to not do anything in Nashville but the way I do is now by immediately getting a wine and finding a corner away from people and ignoring them the minute I sit down, not even bothering with civilities.  It does not make any social event something to look forward to when you go in with an offensive aspect to every encounter.

Why? This is a post I found on City-Data which is over a decade ago. It was a response to another poster who had relocated to the area and the vitriol that descended upon her was surreal.  The attacks, the nasty comments led the moderator to finally shut it down after she returned to say thanks and her appreciation for all the support.  That is how you have to handle these angry bees as they swarm when they think their hive is under assault.   But I found this comment towards the end of the stream and I think it succinctly describes what it is like living here.

Well, I don’t think Tn sucks, but most of it is ‘way behind the times, and people like Pah18 abound here. They are unable to take the slightest criticism or comparison without attacking. Maybe it’s because here in Morristown I’ve noticed a lot of “helplessness” with life and “the way things are”. This grew as basically a factory town, and that has been the big aspiration of a lot of people – a good job in a factory. Yes, things are changing and horizons are broadening, but people who are “from here” like to attack outsiders who criticize. They themselves can gripe all they want, but as soon as someone who “ain’t from here” has an opinion or observation, they are very hateful – they don’t want you to “larn them nothin'” as if you might think you are better than they are, or you know more than they do! God forbid that they are not the most informed, aware, educated, sophisticated townsfolk that ever lived! Perhaps they are tired of being reminded of how little they have lived with and accepted all their lives, yet they weren’t curious or bold enough to actually venture out and find out how people live elsewhere. They are incredibly defensive.

 This little town has a lot of people who think the “big wigs” are anyone with money/power/their own thriving business, etc. I learned in the big city that some people with money are merely big jerks. To me, a person is worthy of respect or admiration only if they do well for their community and treat others well. Too much power over politics and policies here has been in the hands of a handful of self-serving individuals who abuse their power, thus the attitude of some of the town natives.

Tn is a “right to work” state, I believe, which is a misnomer that means they hate unions and you can be fired with no warning for any reason, justified or not. Here’s an interesting item: it was the Hispanics working at the local chicken processing plant who succeeded in unionizing it about 2 years ago! The locals simply complained and either worked there or left; of course, the same locals gripe about the Hispanic influence and label them all as “illegals”. Yes, Redneckia is alive and well.

Tn is also at the bottom of the barrel for education, basically. (And bible classes are still given on the hush-hush in some of the public schools.) People who grew up here commonly think that the ACLU is a bad word, bad people have conspired to “take God out of the schools”, atheists could be devil-worshippers, and yes, evolution is misguided and a sinful, harmful teaching.

As for support for the arts, intellectual discourse, stuff like that? Ha, ha, ha, ha – even at the local college, if you say something like “intellectual discourse” you’ll get a lot of classmates looking at you like they just realized you are from Mars, and if there’s a brave one, he/she will say, “Ah dunno whutchew jus’ say-ed”. Ok, ok, I’m being unfair describing how some speak, but really, don’t they even listen to the news or any half-decent television show to hear more than 2-syllable words? I’m not being overboard here – if you bring your young children to live here, you must be extremely careful at home to foster better language, because your children will learn to say “ain’t” and not bother to conjugate verbs (I don’t, you don’t, he don’t) and will use double negatives (it don’t matter none).

Yes, there are interesting, higher-minded people, but the percentage is so low that it makes it a constant fight warding off the oppression/repression and low achievement/apathy/low mentality of most of the local population. Also, the restrictive, narrow-minded religious attitude is crippling to “intelligent discourse” in general. And yes, this is a dry county. If you like the occasional mixed drink or wine with your meal, basically you can forget it. Live in Knoxville (although in Knoxville a few months ago I was seated next to two women in a restaurant discussing life there after moving from California a couple of years ago, and they were horrified. One of them has a son in high school who said he was leaving Knoxville for university in California as soon as he finished high school.) A few places here are allowed to sell you beer or wine coolers, and there are liquor stores, but the powers-that-be seem to assume that only low-lifes want alcohol, and upstanding people wouldn’t want to be seen imbibing with their meal, would they? Liquor is sinful, doncha know? Freedom – even in “big city” Knoxville (really more like a big town) – is not valued or practiced like it is in many other areas of North America. It is easy to offend by saying things that are considered normal comments and/or discussion elsewhere.

I married a local man, and love the beautiful countryside and some aspects of the slower pace, but after 10 years I am starving for a greater number of more higher-minded, artsy, motivated people. I know a few lovely people here who feel the same way. We can speak to each other about these things, and we do what we can, but I am planning on leaving the area for at least 1/2 the year at a time in order to be among people who enjoy theory, intellect, cultural diversity, etc.

That’s my take, for what it’s worth. And by the way, even the people in Jefferson City (6-7 miles west of here) look down on Morristown, and consider it “rough” and “backwoods”, etc. Jefferson City has Carson Newman Baptist College, and has had many international students and visitors, and more educated people perhaps (Carson-Newman is a 4-year college).

Sorry if I seem “negative”. I have attempted to be precise in identifying factors, attitudes and realities of life here if you are not used to such a lifestyle. I am very glad more people are moving into the area so they can raise standards and raise awareness. However, I am old enough that I cannot wait the 10-20 years for the benefits, the old guard dying off, etc., which is why I will be choosing time away for various parts of the year, at least.

The few comments that followed led the moderator to close the post.  The other ones I have read on Yelp and other public sites have had a similar tone.  The internet seems to bring out all kinds, those in need and those who attack.  It does not shock me that more kids are committing suicide and in turn those who frequently use social media are more depressed.  You cannot go into every encounter expecting the worse and end up finding it.  It is not healthy and in turn social alienation leads to serious problems for both the individual and the community.  Shootings anyone?

I live in a repressive angry community.  And repeatedly Tennessee makes it on the Top 10 lists of the bottom of some quality of life survey.   There is little motivation or even willingness to address and in turn change this.  The amount of historical statues and markers are everywhere and no one cares about them until they do.  This is the standard response in the South.  I have seen it with regards to Transit and Bike Lanes.  We have true problems here and yet the same people who would benefit from it do nothing and are not engaged until someone decides that they need them and in turn provide them with misinformation and use them to wave the race card in order to stop the process of change.  Change is not a word that is used here and if so it is at a register. They are defensive about their lives here to the point it is almost tragic if not also comedic.

And that brings me to John Oliver on Sunday.   To come home from beautiful music and hear his take down of the issues that surround the notion of history as it surrounds the Confederacy made me laugh as it was just the facts.  Funny how facts are funny when someone from the outside points them out. I get it. I really do.

As the woman commented in the post I come from a place of experience and knowledge.  My observations are just those, observations that have led me to question myself and my own system of beliefs.  I have heard the same comments she has only my favorite is, “I have never heard that before.” “Yes well now you have,”  is my standard response and they never seem to know what to say beyond that response other than further negativity.  I recall when I read my 300 words of my essay, The Carpetbagger, and the reaction was a drop the mic moment where they clearly were offended.  I never went back.  Funny I saw the group leader/teacher at the Symphony and I walked immediately out of sight range when I did.  I don’t like who I am becoming and I came already broken and need to heal and irony that in his place of deep Christianity I cannot possible find the healing I need.

True I am in the middle of dental reconstruction and that is affecting my perspective and lending to frustration and further depression but if I am to find myself I need to be wholly functioning and in turn I may find a place here or not.  But I doubt it.   This is not about the people who live here it is about a cultural obsession with history to the point of absurd.  I want nothing to do with history other than study and learn from it.   That is not happening here as I know first hand I am in the schools.  I think that says it all.  

Care for some Sweet Tea?

I laughed my ass off about Senator Bob Corker suddenly calling out Trump saying he doesn’t have the stability or competence to lead effectively.  Well to that better late then never you excuse maker and yet Corker still voted for him and often defended the fuckwit.  So them is fighting words and perhaps Corker is in fact not running for re-election as Trump is beloved here and if he is running for Governor apparently that will also hurt him.  (or not they are really stupid here)

So when Corker who is also quite typical comes out and starts criticizing our Il Douchebag in Chief I busted out laughing. That cagey prick is quite passive aggressive and in turn just as corrupt and idiotic in the same manner.  His history of tax evasion and other folly’s are well documented here and yet he was elected to the Senate.  Where irony he is in the Finance committee.  Perfect frankly. He could look into Trump’s and it would be like looking into a mirror.

But yet is the current round of Trump criticism that may lead Corker to “choose” not to run for Senate re-election and why we have the 100 year old crypt keeper Lamar Alexander firmly in place  this tragedy – both Charlottesville and Trump’s election – has finally opened the dialogue to perhaps examine the history and more importantly the future.
I live in the South and for the past year have been mystified, angry, amused and largely resigned with regards to the way people communicate here.  And yet this tragedy in Charlottesville finally opened the door to the dialogue  about the issue of Race.   But talking is one thing doing is another.  Words but more importantly deeds matter.

I want to point out that Race is secondary to the matters that plague the South as it is not the color black that is the problem, it is the color of green that is.  The massive segregation is that of class and economics.  Then within that class it is divided by Race and Religion followed by Ethnicity and in turn Sexuality.   So that hierarchy is flexible when one is famous and/or rich but it is rarely challenged here as those who are would not live here as there is nothing to offer them other than low taxes. But you can have that in many States that have similar tax bases and less oppressive politics so why again would you choose to live here? 

And then it is when you speak to those of color they have nothing good to say about the “other” and that includes other Ethnic groups, other Religions not Christian and basically anyone who is not a Heterosexual.  And yet RuPaul could come here in full drag and the White and Black community would sashay immediately to a meet and greet.  Other than the heavy Jesus crew they would not and again that crosses color lines. 

I thought it was interesting that Oprah lived in Nashville and went to TSU and failed to graduate due to one credit. Again this is a story I hear repeatedly and it is always oddly faces of color that share similar tales that even I have a hard time believing it and then again this is the place where I think lying while talking is a part of the culture.  And yes that includes Oprah and in some ways makes sense on why she is so successful.  But her  relationship with her father is very fractured and she has little to do with the city despite that he still  lives in the area but that too is a bizarre and very typical scene here. 

Oddities about here.  The amount of Book Festivals, acclaimed Literary Journals published here, amazing Fine Arts colleges and programs, the Nashville Public Library system is nationally recognized and yet I know few who read and again with 30% of the population educated why read?  It is surreal the level of ignorance that dominates the dialogs here.  Oprah needs to start that book club again. 

People in the South LIVE BREATHE and DIE in the past. There are hundred of markers, not just Statues, that endlessly share some obtuse “fact” of history that happened in that place or near that place or about that person or whatever bullshit that whoever puts these up feels in needs mention.  It is fact overload and few if anyone I have ever met read them.  So why the hysteria about a Statue? Well no one actually cared about the Confederate flag either until that was used to kill innocent people in a Church.  That they were black and the punk was a screaming racist was not the real issue.  I can assure you it was because it happened in a Church, the house of God and all that is sacred. Had the punk wrapped himself in the same flag or even made a jumpsuit out of it, renamed himself Nathan Forrest Bedford (proud Tennessean and founder of the KKK) and ran into a Waffle House and killed all the black patrons, that flag would be still hanging on the Capital Steps. 

But that outrage carried over and in time the discussion of that flag – another irony that Nikki Haley was the Governor of South Carolina at the time and is now in the Trump orbit and oddly silent as her boss is one step removed from Dylan Root – that led to its removal.  And now that has been directed toward the Statues and in turn the names of Buildings and other markers that recognize without context who these people are.  I have no problem with said buildings or statues only that we have these same markers that they love with the proper epitaph that says who these assholes are and were and why they are there.  We could have a Confederate Museum for all I care and if you CHOOSE to go there and honor a bunch of racists who am I to say no?  But then that is where it should stop.  I want to walk down a street or enter a building that is not named after some figure of hate and division.  Why would anyone?  Flown into Nixon International lately? Oh wait…

And there has been some push back with regards to some of the Statues (here and across the country) with our Governor encouraging said removal,  this falls to our  infamous State Legislature here or home of the Beav as I like to call it thanks to my love of crazy batshit Mae Beaver (and perhaps inspiration for the crazy eyed Bedford statue on I-65) has the final call on it. And given the hysteria of moving Polk’s tomb out of the Capital and back to his home I don’t think this will be resolved any time soon.  One thing that is consistent is that time moves on a whole other continuum here, might be the humidity.

Go South

I am trying to reconcile the idiocy that I encounter here.  I meet it head on daily in the public schools and the students are only reflections of the holder of that mirror, the Educators.  I am reticent to call them Teachers as so far in my journeys through Nashville Public Schools I have seen little evidence of teaching.

When I see a natural Teacher as I did last week in a local middle school, I was surprised at her soft tone of voice, her natural command of the classroom and her skills at teaching her 5th graders math. The students were attentive and aware and it appeared they understood what the concepts were being taught. I wish I could say I see that consistently.

What I can tell from the lesson plans and from my encounters with students that this is a rarity. Today at the school of the arts a young man was surprised that I intended to actually teach the material as his experience is that subs just let them do what they want. Another student informed me that they had a sub that just played the guitar and sang.  My response was: “What about the word Teacher that confuses you? The substitute part or the Teacher part?”

The children are rude, smug, arrogant and very very stupid. I used to put kids down by using multi-syllabic vocabulary and act as if they understood when they wanted to argue.  Here I just use words and ramble on so fast and furious that I know they can’t follow it and they become frustrated to the point they just shut up.  I am embarassed and ashamed that it has resorted to me being utterly unintelligible and hostile.

I had the opportunity to actually observe the Teacher I was filling in for and it was a lesson is dullness.  He was teaching the poem “Mending Fences” by Robert Frost and what could have inspired a lively and vigorous discussion on what it means by the expression “Good Fences  Make Good Neighbors” instead was a boring talk on the concepts and ideas Frost used to construct the work. Nothing contemporary or anything of relevance was addressed and I looked at the students, some sleeping, some just zoned out and I realized that this was just another day in the life in the schools of Nashville. He is the rule not the exception in this shithole of a district.

I talked to one student and she believes that the South is regressive when it comes to being open to change and that when they meet or encounter anything or anyone that disrupts their limited world view they become abusive, resentful and closed off.  I had a similar discussion with a young girl last week who said she had finally realized that her learning was affected by her beliefs and that she had to realize that as long as she refused to let go of them and open herself up to varying ideas she was never going to learn.  BINGO!   These are the exceptions in this shithole of a district.

And that summarizes the South, the idea that beliefs trump knowledge and that anything that puts those beliefs at risk are to be  ignored, belittled or summarily dismissed.  It is as if they just found out the world is round and this is not working out at all!

I found this article in Salon about growing up in the South and I think it accurately portrays what I have found in my stay here.  I cannot wait to get out of the schools, I feel ashamed, dirty and utterly abused.

Lies I learned as a Southerner: Racism, the Confederate flag and why so many white Southerners revere a symbol of hatred

Myths about the “Lost Cause,” never mentioning race, came from our schools, from everywhere. Time to smash them

Charles McCain
Salon
July 15 2015

“This is where my grandfather shot and killed the Yankee soldier trying to rob us,” the retired Army colonel said, pointing to a bullet hole in the wood lining the entrance hall of his home.

My Boy Scout troop was visiting to view this noble reminder of the Civil War and how Southerners had resisted Union soldiers. It was 1970. I was fifteen. All of us gazed with reverence upon the hole as if medieval Catholics peering at the toe of a saint.

We were absorbing the Southern narrative of the Civil War. In February of 1865 Sherman’s bummers had invaded my small hometown in the South Carolina low country. This man’s grandfather had defended his home as any honorable Southerner would have done.

In the history of the Civil War preached to us lads growing up in the South in those years, slavery was never mentioned. Just perfidious Yankees and our brave boys in gray who repelled them until they were “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources,” as General Lee described the situation in his General Order No. 9 announcing the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Only a fool would interpret his words as admitting defeat. We weren’t defeated. We were just compelled to surrender. Completely different, of course.

Other realities had to be suppressed as well. When the North invaded the South all white Southern males eagerly volunteered to fight against the armies of the Union. But this is not true. The Confederate States passed the first conscription law on the North American continent on 16 April 1862. All white males between seventeen and fifty were required to serve three years in the Confederate Army.

Not every white Southern male was keen on this idea. From the very beginning of the law, many conscripts deserted from the army with the intent of never returning. This became in immense problem in the Southern armies. Not being consonant with the image of the “Lost Cause,” it was rarely mentioned in my youth and rarely mentioned now.

The penalty for desertion was death. Since tens of thousands of men deserted, they could not all be executed. But several hundred were shot by their brothers-in-arms in front of assembled Confederate regiments pour encourager les autres.

Over time we learned that after believing in Jesus Christ, our second most important moral and spiritual task was to uphold the honor of South Carolina and our native South. Be prepared to fight anyone if they insulted our heritage, most especially the Confederacy. Such insults were assaults on our honor as Southerners, something we are very touchy about.

Why did the South of our youth imbue us with such false knowledge? Because the memory of the Confederate defeat shaped Southern culture then and now. C. Vann Woodward, one of the greatest historians of the South, wrote that after the war ended, the Southerners had to learn “…the un-American lesson of submission. For the South had undergone an experience that it could share with no other part of America…..the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction.”

Because of this searing ordeal, Southerners had and continue to have a radically different historical narrative than the remainder of America. We have distorted our history to fit the Myth of the Lost Cause and it is this history which explains our obsession with the Civil War. Most Americans find both our narrative and our obsession with the war inexplicable. But it isn’t, really.

What Americans outside the South don’t understand is the Confederate defeat was so devastating the impact reverberates to this day. And where the depredations were the greatest, the war is remembered even more strongly. How could it not be? Columbia, the capital of South Carolina? Burned. Charleston? Bombarded. Plantations close by the city burned to the ground. Those of us born and raised in the Deep South grow up in a history book. My birthplace, Mobile, Alabama? Seized and burned after years of off and on attacks. New Orleans where I went to college? Seized by Union troops early in the war cutting off Gulf South from its key port.

In December of 1864, a month prior to crossing into South Carolina after“making Georgia howl,” General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to H. W. Halleck, Union Army Chief-of-Staff, “… the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.” Because South Carolina had started the Civil War, Union troops viewed it as the cradle of secession, which it was.

While Sherman had no need to ratchet-up their desire of vengeance, he did so anyway by saying to his men, “We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”

South Carolina soon thereafter felt the hard hand of war as no other place in the United States ever had— or ever will. Dozens of towns, plantations and public buildings were looted and burned. My hometown went up in smoke after Sherman’s bummers put it to the torch —an event the adults of my childhood often spoke about. Sherman wanted the South and South Carolina in specific to remember the pain and destruction of the war so we would never rebel again. We remembered. Unfortunately, the Union Army’s march through South Carolina was so devastating that we have continued to remember.

One of the tallest structures in my hometown was the monument to the local Confederate dead—impossible to miss for our bronze Confederate soldier stood atop a fifty foot limestone plinth in the middle of the town square. In 1960, following the lead of our legislature, the town also began to fly the Confederate flag on its official flagpole, also on the town square. Unfortunately, the rectangular banner with the elongated blue X known to most Americans, including Southerners, as “the Confederate flag” is actually the second Confederate naval jack which only flew on ships of the Confederate Navy from 1863 to 1865 and nowhere else. (The Confederacy kept changing flags and had different flags for different things).

To any student of the Civil War, flying the Confederate naval jack seems absurd, stupid even. But I hardly thought such things then. Did I believe we should always honor our gallant Confederate dead? Of course. Have streets in towns throughout the state named after Stonewall Jackson, Jeff Davis, and that crackpot political theorist, John C. Calhoun? Absolutely. In common with most white Southerners, I also revered the memory of General Robert E. Lee.

This was the man who possessed the greatest military mind ever produced in America; the man who became the very model of a Southern gentleman; who led the fabled Army of Northern Virginia; who was betrayed by Longstreet at Gettysburg and who now rests under a recumbent statue of himself, like a medieval knight in Christ like repose, in the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University.

Did Robert E. Lee oppose slavery? Of course he did—not. In reality he didn’t and had his slaves whipped for infractions by the local slave dealers. Was he a traitor by renouncing his sacred oath to defend the United States and joining the Confederate Army? I don’t think anyone in the South of my youth ever had that thought. But yes, while painful for me to write, Robert E. Lee was a traitor. Half of all Southern-born officers in the Union Army in 1860 remained loyal to the United States and never went South. They stayed true to their sacred oaths.

As for the greatest military mind produced by America? Lee lost the Battle of Gettysburg, the most critical battle in the Eastern Theater of the war. In those three days, one quarter of his men were also killed or wounded. Never again would the Army of Northern Virginia be capable of offensive action on a large scale.

All the misinformation I absorbed seemed right to me until my early twenties when my indoctrination began to slowly melt away — although that process took ten years. Like many Southerners, as I grew older and read and studied unbiased accounts of the Civil War, I rejected the idolization of the Confederacy. Dropped out of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and admitted the truth to myself: the South started the Civil War with South Carolina leading the way.

So why do so many whites in the South and especially South Carolina still cling with all their strength to the memory of the Confederacy? Because the American Civil War has never ended for much of the white South. Bitterness over the Confederate defeat remains. For decades after the war, everyone knew where the bitterness came from: the horrifying losses experienced by the Southern armies, the destructive vengeance by Northern troops and the enfranchisement of freed black slaves.

Unfortunately, over time this litany of specifics has been distilled into a blurry folk memory which has been manifested in willing provincial ignorance combined with the violent racism of the decades before the 1970s. When blacks began to be nominally treated with due process of law in the South, violence against them by whites declined. But provincial ignorance remains with many white Southerners seeming to take a perverse sort of pride in their lack of knowledge about the wider world.

Worse, virulent racism continues, fueled by a devil’s brew of rage against change, the perceived arrogance of Washington, the liberal media holding-up white Southerners to ridicule, economic stagnation and the most maddening of all, a black man as president. Beyond the immediate effects, all of these threaten the myth of the Lost Cause.

For Southerners, the memory of the Confederacy is part of our fierce regional identity. Even for me, a liberal Democrat, my strong regional identity separates me from Americans who aren’t from the South. By my own choice, I have not lived in the South for decades yet retain my gentle low country accent, my increasingly old-fashioned manners drilled into me as a child and my connections to a myriad of relatives and friends. I never forget that I am a Southerner and a South Carolinian—nor do I want to. I’m proud of my heritage—some of it—my family and my state.

In a time of head-spinning change, most of us cling to what we know, to what we were taught, to some sort of tradition which gives us identity. The South being the most conservative and traditional part of the country clings to its old traditions. And much of Southern tradition is the Confederacy represented by the Confederate flag. In a world moving at warp speed, many whites in the South sense they are losing their identity as Southerners and the more they feel this, the more vehement white Southerners become in defense of these symbols.

The trauma of the Confederate defeat cut to the bone of the South especially in my native state of South Carolina. When the fighting stopped in April of 1865 and the Confederacy collapsed, 260,000 white Southern males lay dead—23% of those eligible to serve in the Confederate Army. 21,000 were South Carolinians. This was a demographic catastrophe from which the South has never recovered. CSA managed to achieve almost total mobilization of white males into the army so the war touched every family.

When the Civil War finally ended, how could white Southerners come to an emotional acceptance of the hurricane of violence which had passed over them leaving a trail of destruction never imagined and a burden of grief so heavy such as Atlas never had to lift. To bear this, white Southerners had to look for a noble reason to explain why so many of their sons had died as a result of the war. That reason could not be the preservation of slavery. Only finding another reason was difficult since the Civil War was about preserving slavery.

Searching for this reason, white Southerners had to blind themselves to reality since they were surrounded by a huge population of freed slaves—whites actually being in a minority in South Carolina and several other Southern states at that time. Former slaves, written of in memoirs as being indolent, insulting, shiftless and unwilling to do any work, were a constant reminder of one of the major consequences of having lost the war.

And to preserve the “peculiar institution” the South had made a blood sacrifice of one-quarter of its young white males killed— with twice as many wounded— a casualty rate of 75 percent among those who served. Unprecedented in American history or Western history in the modern era. These brave young men clad in honorable gray could not have died to keep all these insolent, ignorant, lazy blacks enslaved. What kind of cause was that to die for?

There had to be another reason, a myth as it were. Slowly a cultural myth came to the fore: the South had fought the Civil War to secure Southern independence from the North and not for the right to maintain the institution of black slavery. The golden youths who had sacrificed their lives for the Confederacy became the revered dead of the South. Having given their lives in the War for Southern Independence, a truly righteous and just fight , the Confederate dead became the keystone in the creation of the myth of the “Lost Cause.” Since they died for such a glorious cause, these were young men for whom enough tears could never be shed.

The wording on the monument to the Confederate dead on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, which I have abbreviated, explains with simple eloquence how South Carolinians and by extension other white Southerners, came to remembered the war and how many still remember it today.

This monument
perpetuates the memory,
of those who…
have glorified a fallen cause
by the simple manhood of their lives,
the patient endurance of suffering,
and the heroism of death
and who,
found support and consolation
in the belief
that at home they would not be forgotten.

###

Let the stranger,
who may in future times
read this inscription,
recognize that these were men
whom power could not corrupt,
whom death could not terrify,
whom defeat could not dishonor;
and let their virtues plead
for just judgement
of the cause in which they perished….
May 13, 1879

This is the summary of the Myth of the Lost Cause. Unfortunately, the dehumanizing and soul destroying institution of black slavery, any mention of slaves who had suffered far worse, is not mentioned or even hinted at. And slavery could never be mentioned because it would shatter the Myth.

Writes Nobel Laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul on the sparse eloquence of this inscription:

“…the pain of the Confederate Memorial is very great; the defeat it speaks of is complete. Defeat like this leads to religion: it can be religion: the crucifixion, as eternal a grief for Christians, as for the Shias of Islam, the death of Ali and his sons…..the helpless grief and rage, such as the Shias know, about an injustice that cannot be rehearsed too often.” “A Turn In the South,” (1986, Knopf, NYC)

The belief that it was not about slavery is a studied denial of the truth, a willing suspension-of-disbelief which allows white Southerners to fully embrace the myth of the “Lost Cause” which propagates the lie that the war was fought for Southern independence and not for slavery.

Nothing cemented this myth more than the film “Gone With the Wind.” The opening title card before the movie begins reads: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South… Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind…”

This is laughably untrue—a historical lie as wide as the Mississippi River is long. Worse, this belief by so many white Southerners that the Confederacy fought for Southern independence and not to preserve slavery has itself been a disaster for the South. Why? Two reasons. One, by holding white Southerners in its grip, this belief has prevented the whites from accepting blacks as equals and moving past the trauma of the Civil War. Two, by accepting the lie that the Civil War was fought for Southern independence and not to preserve slavery, the only way to preserve the Myth of the Lost Cause was to create a post-bellum society of brutal white supremacy so as to be completely different and hence nominally independent from the North.

The idée fixe that the war was about Southern independence absolves white Southerners from facing the truth of the war and breaking their emotional bond to the former Confederacy. Many conservative white Southerners remain in denial about the brutal reality of African-American slavery in the South. Black slaves were the property of their owners just like master’s house or horse.

Owners could kill their slaves if they wished. Rape the females—which they did. (And the males, too). Or starve them. Or make them work for twenty hours a day to get the harvest in—which they did. Whip them, which they did. Torture them, which they did. Even castrate them—a practice so barbaric it was outlawed in the Roman Empire by successive decrees of Emperors before the coming of Christ.

Most white Southerners will not— and cannot— confront the truth of the Civil War, for to do so is to acknowledge that the Myth of the Lost Cause is exactly that. And if they acknowledged the myth, they would have to accept that their ancestors (and my ancestors) fought the Civil War to keep 3 ½ million blacks enslaved in a system as brutal, as violent, and as filled with hopelessness as the labor camps of the Soviet gulag or konzentrationslägers of Nazi Germany.

In the process of accepting this unvarnished truth, white Southerners would also have to acknowledge the Confederate flag for what it actually represents: a nation long dead which fought a war to preserve the monstrous evil of African-American slavery. Further, white Southerners would also have to give up the comforting thought that only a handful of white Southerners owned slaves which is absolutely wrong. One-third of Southern families owned at least one or more slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina the number of slave owning households approached one half.

Only when the Myth of the Lost Cause is finally exposed as a complete fraud and smashed into pieces by white Southerners themselves, will the South move past its reverence for the Confederacy and accept the moral imperative of African-American equality in the South, America and throughout the world.