Opinion: The Quiet Violence Of The South

My grandfather was almost killed in the city at sunset.

I haven’t met her yet, but I remember my grandmother telling me about how she often toured the country. On many of these trips he may be in a city he doesn’t know and he needs to find accommodation before dark, because – well, he may be in the city at sunset.

In cities at dusk, blacks are relatively free to walk during the day. But after dark they can be arrested, beaten and sometimes killed, precisely because of the color of their skin. Oklahoma City, where I live now, is one of these places. Sometimes the founders and leaders of sunset cities tried to treat people rationally by talking about the danger of crime followed by blacks. But honestly, it’s just a way to keep people like me in their place.

The story goes that one night my grandfather found himself in one of these cities. He had to drive for hours until he found a place to spend the night. Fortunately, he did not collide with the police. If they did, they could be arrested or killed. It’s a threat that blacks have historically resisted in South America – and that treatment didn’t end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.

There has been the blatant violence, lynching and racial genocide that America has only just become accustomed to. But for Americans whose skin is sunburned, there is always another form of violence.

There has been sexual violence affecting black women, something that has happened more often than usual. There was economic violence that pushed black children into underfunded and understaffed schools – and then people wondered why the educational outcomes of these children were so bad, while the authorities has set conditions that have made it unavoidable. But the most common form of violence in the South is what I like to call silent vice. ᲜLet me explain.

My mother was born in a separate community in southeastern Oklahoma. When I was in high school, my mother graduated and every summer she sent me to study with my grandmother, who still lives in the community. My cousins ​​and I went wild in the countryside during the summer, but whenever a white woman came into my grandmother’s house we had to keep quiet and, as my grandmother would say, “we seemed to make sense”. If we ever go to the store and meet white people, even those we don’t know, we should call them “Mr.” Or “miss”. I noticed that we weren’t both kind to blacks, I once asked my grandmother why we would do it.

“Okay, baby,” he sighed and turned away. “Everything is like this here. You’re from the city, so you don’t have to make it to the city. But here you will be beaten, or worse, if you talk to them differently. ‘

I didn’t understand then what he meant, but now I understand.

You see, somewhere in 1865, after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, whites – feeling that they no longer possessed the same power as before – created it. Black codes.

“Across the south,” says a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, “black codes have been passed that prohibit black-style behaviors, such as‘ walking aimlessly ’or‘ walking at night, hunting every Sunday, or residence on public or private land. ‘

These arbitrary laws form the basis for the rising arrest rate of black men in the south. And also aWhen Jim Crowe finished, he continued ordering.

Blacks are in a state of submission and whites continue to reign in fear. It still shows up today in countless forms. The South is developing slowly. This is followed by southern racism. Violence is rooted in the South; So is the story of loss.

There are so many ways of associating South America with blacks that we allow and do not accept. Confederate monuments, for example: You cannot go to one of the southern states unless you see a statue of a Confederate soldier or a street or building with the name of a Confederate leader. Some may think that the “Black Lives” movement has destroyed all traces of the American Confederate’s legacy, but this is not the case. Although the Black Revolt facilitated the demolition or renaming of 73 Confederate monuments, more than 700 others remained.

Nor does it end here. According to research Southern Poverty Law Center“There are more ways to honor the Confederates (741) than monuments.” And, as the report says, there are schools (201), districts and municipalities (104), parks (38), buildings (51), vacations (22), military bases (10), memorial room (7) and crowds. These water areas (6) and bridges (6) play important cultural work to strengthen white supremacy.

Most of these statues, reminiscent of American atrocities, are located in the south, although they can be seen elsewhere. Racism is a nationwide problem, but the South has not forgotten in America what our savages were. Many white southerners continue to vote against their own interests for reasons other than harm to people of color. Republicans “Southern Strategy” As Lee Atwater Known in 1981, It turned out beautiful. Republicans know that if they can vote racists for the GOP, they will occupy the South for a generation or more. Then, Atwater, who later headed the Republican National Committee, clarified when he said:

You started in 1954, you said, “Nigger, Niger, Nigher”. In 1968 you couldn’t call him “brown” – it was painful, it had the opposite effect. So you say things like, uh, forced buses, state rights and all, and you become abstract. Now you’re talking about tax cuts, and all you’re talking about is purely economic issues, and their byproduct is that blacks are worse than whites… “We want to reduce this ”, more. Abstract than doing the work, uh, and much more abstract than “Nigger, Nigger”.

Despite all this, blacks in the south still expected whites to be treated with respect, and most blacks left peacefully. Those who rebelled against this command often failed and left the South, or were named as the creators of unrest. This condition still persists in some small towns in the south. And while this culture of intimidation does not face violence, it does support the threat of indirect violence. Blacks know that if something bothers them too much, if they speak out loud, physical violence doesn’t catch on. And this fear of physical violence becomes one, more deceptive form of violence. This leads to altered behavior and a second hypothesis, a constant sour taste in the back of the throat. Knowing that at any time someone can use their whites and self-determination as a tool to control black behavior is violence.

In the 1980s, a black man (whose name I won’t use here to avoid danger) became frustrated with the quiet vices that darkened his life. In Harris, Oklahoma, he dismissed whites as “Mr.” and “Mrs”. He refused to allow whites to intercept. He rejected her words with self -loathing as he faced them. He was a local basketball star, but was beaten up on at least one summer night because whites were too bored with him. This silent vice is true and has consequences if a person strays too far from the line.

We pay attention to the police killings and other forms of outright violence that have pervaded the black cities in America so that we lose sight of the quiet evil that gives color to every moment of black life in the countryside in south.

Cities at sunset, black codes and quiet violence in the south still exist. They live in the shadow of night, hiding as observers, waiting for your release to show you how real they are.