STFU Hatemongers

Not just for this, but a multitude of reasons.

The summer before my Senior year of high school (I am currently a college freshman), my mother sat me down when a show I can’t remember the name of came on, all about the civil rights movement and the things that happened.

She told me, “It’s time to learn about your history.”

I didn’t really take her seriously, I assumed I knew everything that I needed to know about my heritage; be wary of confederate flags, don’t walk by myself when we visit my Granny in my hometown of  Troy, Alabama, blah, blah, snore.

But as that program played, I sat on the couch by my mother, confused, enthralled, disgusted, and saddened all at once, asked questions and soaked in my mom’s answers. I was eighteen years old and thought I understood everything, and realized I didn’t even understand my own history. 

Then we got to the segment with Emmett Till.

If you don’t know who he is, he is a young black man from Chicago who went to visit cousins in the Mississippi Delta and allegedly whistled at or flirted with a white woman in a store. Her husband and his relative then went after him, took him out of his bed in the night, pistol whipped him, beat him more than once, shot him in the head and killed him, weighted his body with the fan of a stolen cotton gin, and threw him in the Mississippi River. He was fourteen. They were tried by an all white jury, acquitted, and then later admitted to the crime, but could not be tried again due to double jeopardy laws. His mother held an open casket funeral, invited photos to be taken, told the media “I want them to see what they did to my son.”

Then they showed the picture.

His face was bloated, distorted, damaged, almost inhuman. I could not see his eyes. They were nothing more than slats in a deformed, bloated face. His body was bloated from being weighted in the river. All the while, I stared, begged my mother to change the channel, and cried hysterically until I gagged. I couldn’t handle it. I asked my mom what kind of human could do that. He didn’t look like a person anymore, but some humanoid lump of pulverized meat (for lack of better wording). The image horrified me, haunted me, gave me nightmares.

The next day, I was walking with friends, Mark and Kelly. Mark is black, Kelly is white. I decided to tell them about the picture, and as I told them how it affected me, Kelly scoffed,

“I don’t know why you got all upset. I’ve seen the picture, it just looked like another dead body to me.”

I shook my head, “But it’s not. Yes, it’s a dead body, but this is a dead body as a result of a hate crime of the worst sort, doesn’t that bother you? People did this to him over something he may not have even done, and even if he did, he didn’t deserve this. They did it, they treated him as less than human, less than the dirt that we’re walking on now, got acquitted despite blatant proof that they did it, and then admitted to it and couldn’t be tried due to double jeopardy laws! Doesn’t that disturb you? Doesn’t that bother or upset you?”

“No. Why should it? People die all the time.”

“He didn’t die. He didn’t get sick and die, he was killed.”

“Which happens every day.”

I was shocked. Call it an overreaction, but I found it inhuman that she could give less than two fucks over the death of a boy not too much younger than we are, and I assumed it was that she couldn’t understand because she was white. So I turned to Mark, asked him what he thought of it, how he felt.

“God, Erica, it’s not that serious. It doesn’t happen anymore and it doesn’t affect us now. Why are you taking this so seriously?” He smiled at me, as if I were silly, as if I were simple for thinking this was atrocious. 

I scoffed, “You guys can’t be serious.”

Kelly mocked me, “Okay, it’s totally that serious. You live in suburbia and it’ll never happen to you, but it’s totally that serious.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, mouth open.

I wanted to tell her about all the times I’ve been glared at, not just in the South, but here. I wanted to tell her how white people hold purses closer and kids tighter and walk faster to their cars and lock the doors as I get in my own car, as if expecting me to come after them, their family, and their money, as if I’m actually going to get my black ass out of my car to come get theirs. I wanted to tell her how in my own hometown, where my family is kind of prominent and I’m often recognized by strangers who recognize my facial features as a White (Our last name is White and we live not far from the most racist city during the Civil Rights Movement. Odd.), I can’t even walk into a Wal*Mart without getting followed by security, stared down, and called a nigger when they think I’m out of earshot or they think it’s too quiet to hear. 

Even worse, I wanted to punch her in the neck, I wanted to shake him for being ignorant, not ignorant in the sense of making an idiot of himself, but in the dictionary sense of the word, the fact that he didn’t know. I wanted to take a stand, stamp my feet, scream, tell them to wake up! There are still people who think like this! There are still people who want black people dead and in chains and…and…

But I didn’t. Not then. I just walked on behind them, seperate but equal, acknowledging that something changed in that moment, and I was different now. That day, as I walked behind, I sat up a little straighter. I held my head a little higher. I was an (kind of) educated Black woman, I knew more about my heritage, my history, how I got to be where I am, why I can sit in class next to a white kid and get an equal education, why I can go to college in America and cannot legally be denied entry on the grounds of my race. That documentary changed me. I wasn’t going to sit back and accept racism, not anymore. It does still happen, and it’s not okay.

The image of Emmett Till, not just his mangled body but the image of him six months prior to his death, a profoundly human picture of a boy in his Sunday hat, still haunts me from time to time. It sticks with me, it’s burned into my mind. But now, I kind of want to thank him. His death taught me a lesson about racism I will never forget, and his lesson coupled with the lessons of my mother made me aware. Racism isn’t dead, not by a long shot. It’s never going to die. There’s always gonna be someone who hates someone for their color and their heritage, but they’re not going to say it because someone’s going to call them a bigot, and while they may not know what a bigot is, they know it’s a bad name they don’t want tagged onto them (unless you’re on the internet, where people have no common fucking sense and lose their goddamn minds because they feel safe behind a screen).

So no, racism isn’t dead.

Just like that woman in the store, it’s just really fucking quiet.