This is the third in a series of articles that I started in April. I’m not sure how many more articles in this series I will write. Some parts of these stories are not only my stories. They are sensitive and personal to other family members.
In Part 1, I alluded to reasons why people who aren’t white supremacists or even overtly racist could be motivated by Donald Trump’s rhetoric about building walls, keeping Muslims out of the country and putting Muslim communities under surveillance to support him. In this article, I will explore some of those reasons with some familial examples.
But first, I will say that there are many racists in the part of Florida where my family lives. There are racists in my extended family. I don’t think you could grow up white in post-Reconstruction Alabama and not absorb the miasma of resentment and sense of stolen pride, stolen class, and stolen means for self-betterment that had been passed down for generations in the White South. But, these are the struggles of a generation that is not mine, and not all families passed resentment down from generation to generation ad infinitum. For Southern whites, there was a great playing field leveler that came into existence after World War II. A new road to success via joining the professional class was opened by the GI Bill for my dad and his brothers, and for their peers. The road was a wide thoroughfare before crippling student debt opened up gaping potholes. I’ll stop belaboring the metaphor, but a college education is too often now a road to indentured servitude. By contrast to my father’s family, on my mother’s side, several family members were left behind, literally and figuratively, while others went to college after serving in the military and then moved out of the South.
Continue reading “Wherein I ponder family, politics, and mortality – Part 3”
