That was beautiful.
I'm a racist too. But I'm trying to do better.
A beautiful commentary with much insight. Where we on the Left have gone wrong for so many years is in the midst of our conviction in the superiority of our own ideas, we take delight in demeaning those not as "enlightened" as ourselves. True dialog can be a wondrous opportunity to learn as well as teach (preach?).
I began to realize that I was making a stab at becoming wise in my life, when I came to realize that there was so much I didn't know, or understand.
Yes there are real asses in the political world and by my lights most identify themselves as conservative and deserve little respect. Those are the people though, who are making money or playing for ego gratification. A lot of other people are just getting screwed, or just are victims of their environment. Connections can be made with them and growth can occur on both sides of the dialog. We need to remember that besides being politically active, we're just people too. Human connections are beautiful things.
When the white cabbie said that he had no problem with his wife being Mexican, do you think he was conceding the point that racism stops where love starts? The heart, of course, has no eyes so it doesn't see skin color.
Just a thought.
Fascinating, Maggie. I love those seemingly random moments that can open up worlds. Of course you, the poet, pay attention to them.
who knows where the dynamics of a love might turn? not me.
brilliant and beautiful maggie...
Racism is a Jacob Marley burden of clanking chains, whether you are its object or the trained maintainer of it.
perfect description. in his notes on the state of virginia thomas jefferson saw that very same thing. that, as an institution, slavery corrupted all who touched it. slaves, masters, traders, dealers, everybody and everything that was involved with slavery was corrupted.
i can only hope that it was not something that corrupted beyond hope of redemption.
again, great job maggie.
Wow.
My Hoosier mind is set to processing and remembering. I grew up among well-meaning racists and homophobes tempered and constrained by careers at a cosmopolitan University.
What a long, stumbling path it's been. Your story is a teaching.
Wow.
The second cabbie sounds like a man who has been deeply affected by the racist environment he grew up in, and knows this has left him tainted with racist biases that he doesn't really believe in.
I find this more admirable than the white guy who says with conviction, "I don't have a racist bone in my body!" when everyone who knows him knows differently.
I've been thinking about this the last few weeks. Going back over old memories, of things I never questioned while they were happening. Because you don't when you're 4 or 5 years old. You just absorb it.
Racism isn't just a contagious mental disease, it was one that absolutely permeated American culture on every level I had access to when I was a kid.
The odds you're going to come through something like that and not be infected are too small to be seen with the unaided eye. It's like measles or mumps prior to the vaccinations, which we didn't have when I was a kid. Everybody came down with these, and if you didn't contract mumps before late adolescence, your parents would worry.
It's the same way with racism. With misogyny. With anti-intellectualism, in some places. Where and when I grew up, the Catholic Church didn't have the reach and scope to foster real religious hatreds, but it wasn't for lack of trying.
The only thing I can report out of my own experiences that's positive is that with vigilance and constant attention, you can clean some of this crap out of your head, and render yourself sensitive enough so that when it reappears in the popular culture, you'll react. Instead of just blindly drinking the Kool-Aid that's set before you, as you did as a child.
I'll probably still be "taking out the trash" the day before they plant me.
I used to bridle at "political correctness" before I started thinking of things like this as contagious mental diseases. Now I don't. It's the only way we can ever hope to eventually raise generations of kids who are clean of this poison.
Maggie: That's a damn fine piece of writing!
I hope so too, Minstrel Boy. I'm pinning the work of a lifetime on that hope.
Thanks for the feedback. I have to say, Wanderer, I had not considered that particular interpretation, but I am now. And congrats, Rotten McDonald. I hear ya.
And yeah, Mike, superiority has not gotten us anywhere, has it? I really appreciate Digby's constant reminder that WE ARE THE CENTER, we are the mainstream. The differences between us are not to be ignored (I'm no more fond of the notion that we ignore political differences than I am of the idiocy which proclaims "I don't notice skin color"), but differences still generally allow us room to work in alliance. A lesson I think Dems have to re-learn. I don't mean the kind of malignant clumping of Gingrich and Rove's Republicanism -- I mean alliances, not death squads.
And Liza, you hit it on the head. Coming at activism from an artist's perspective has been the ballast I've needed -- me with six planets in Leo, I had to have SOMETHING to contradict all that fixed stasis in my make-up.
Wonderful, Maggie....thank you for being here and giving us this tale.
The older I get, the more I know that we are here to learn, every day. There is so much out there that we can see and hear and if we can open ourselves to what it is that is really, actually, there....we will be able to learn from all of it. But we have to be willing and we have to be ready.
Too many people, and I think most of them can be counted as conservatives, already think they know all they need to know. Usually it's because of some bogus religious idea that they have that makes them think they have all the answers, but if everyone could really just listen to others and hear what their story is, we'd all be better.
As a product of South Texas, there is a lot of racism here, but as your second cabbie said, his wife is Mexican and that is okay with him. Almost everyone here has a family member somewhere who is Hispanic, so those edges are really blurring. One day, maybe, we'll all be the same color.
How cool will that be?
Amazing work, Maggie. Just amazing.
I'm remembering standing there next to you as you told me of this just after it happened there in the still blistering shade of the tree at Jo's Coffee.
I was indeed astounded. NO ONE comes out and admits what that cabbie did. But you touched a chord of humanity in him when you shared—bluntly— about your own folks. Without judgement. Just fact.
It is what it is, and in so doing, you put him at ease and he shared his complex feelings.
It is what it is—squared.
We talk at each other so much, and so rarely to. This was a case of the latter opening doors. Of communication, and...maybe...a bit of healing.
When you spoke on this, I was screaming in my mind “She must write on this”, and I'm so glad you have. 
And folks, you should have heard the follow-up conversation she and I had about folks like her co-star in the dramatization of this slice-of life, Robert Duvall—who may have the most retrograde of politics, but still are amazing creative forces in the arts.
But that's for another time...
Welcome aboard Maggie! And let me say it was a pleasure meeting you, and strolling Austin's streets and just plain talking to you as well.
Even dodging the Grackle poop was fun.
grackles are interesting birds. they get a lot of bad press. it's common here (where we have boat tail grackles) to hear people bad mouth them all the time.
i've been studying them for a while, just sitting on my porch watching them and i've discovered some interesting stuff.
first off, they are mosquito and other bug eating machines. i have seen them on my tomatoes and among the squash, doing yeoman service in pest control. i have seen them at standing water sucking up mosquito larvae like it was a grackle caviar tin.
but the best thing that i saw was after a windstorm. a grackle fledgling was tossed from the nest. not ready to fly, but with just enough feathers to be caught by the vicious winds. for the rest of the week there were always adult grackles, obviously a community effort guarding and feeding the vulnerable baby against, dogs, cats, other birds (including hawks and herons). it was brave and beautiful to see.
they do poop a lot though.
amazing what a little familiarity can do for birds, and people.
it's also strange to note that the most recent manifestations of human racial genocides have taken place in areas where there was widespread assimilation. the jews of germany and poland were among the most assimilated and intermarried people in all of europe, same with the tutsi and hutu populations of rwanda, same with the muslims and slav populations of the balkans.
it's not what one would expect is it?
MInstrel, that last paragraph of yours is mind numbing. That's food for thought for a long, long, time. Hell of an observation, given how well for the most part this country is assimilated within itself (racial divides apart).
The ascension to power, control and leadership thru fear mongering, even if you have to make up the fear to begin with . . . whew.
Maggie, thanks so much for this, this is great writing. I hope we get to read more of your thoughts.
Heck of a post Maggie Jo . . . thanks for sharing. I too recall (born '53 but raised in SE Asia till '63) racism and misogony being all around me as a young boy, even thru my middle teens. Even overseas, where white people were overtly both.
I got in a lot of trouble in grade schools cuz I wouldn't buy into it. Wasn't until late in high school (by then the hippies had changed a LOT) that I saw it subside some. Sadly, a lot of it went underground, rather than just disappearing.
And it lingers there, today. I'd venture that it's actually becoming more overt and violent in the past decade, even in CA.
Well. What a fabulous addition to this blog.
I found all my Austin cabbies to be extremely talkative, and inquisitive about NN. We had great conversations, but perhaps I should have listened more closely.
Next time.
This happens to me all the time when I am alone with white people. They assume I am one of them, but I have some signal I give off which also alerts them that perhaps I am Not Quite In Line.
All my life. It is disheartening at times. "Oh, uh huh" is my "oh fuck not again" moment to gather and just as you say "stay present" with my fellow human and attempt a positive outcome. Generally, it is that. But it is like a needle scratches across a record suddenly. Jarring. For particulary obnoxious situations racist and sexist, I need say nothing but just go blank and kinda blink. Absent of whatever emotion they'd hoped to illicit from the obnoxiousness, they instantly start thinking, then talking, sometimes apologizing "I'm not really a racist/sexist" kind of stuff. And I just say "Well, I didn't think you were. I think you're a better person than that". Even if I don't know them I say that, in ernest, to their human self, and mostly leave it with them to reconcile within.
This is a beautiful post, Maggie. Thank you for writing so wonderfully about these moments where the real change occurs... human to human... one human at a time. Congrats on your scholarship to NN as well. Great job!!
Along with what Minstrel boy said what do you all think of this> article from Open Left which argues that most of the time different groups work better among themselves.
Maybe we should all separate.
Wonderfly-written essay--thank you--
I drove a cab in Austin for several years, for Roy's Taxi and later for Yellow, and there were always a few drivers around who were up front about their racism and their readiness for a race war...
...and of course I spent a lot of time watching great-tailed grackles while waiting for the next call to come in. Love those birds--
So amazing, Maggie. Thank you.
beautiful, Maggie, thank you.
it's hard, though. I have my own prejudices, some of which came up this weekend, and luckily loved ones around to gently point them out. And I tried to argue that that wasn't what it was, when I knew that it was just that, just that...
sigh.
it's easier to be open when I remember what it's like to be the other...
Interesting contrasts, and a great post!
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