The Real Americans
Jul. 19th, 2012 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydionI know I should shut up about Chris Christie's claims that African Americans would have been so much better off if they had stayed quiet and waited for white Southerners to give them their rights, but it just bugs me on a fundamental level. The Republican argument is that all the violence white people inflicted on civil rights workers could have been avoided and lives saved. The only way this makes any sense is if folks like Chris Christie discount all the violence and misery that white people were already inflicting on people of colour. It ignores all the beatings and lynchings and the day to day cruelties. It ignores Sunset laws and the denial of education and opportunity. There was and still is a whole lot of violence aimed at innocent people. The difference is that the people who were injured and killed as part of the Civil Rights movement at least died FOR something. They died for the right to vote or to end segregation. They died fighting to make a better world for their children and grand children. Better not to be beaten or killed or imprisoned at all, but if those things were going to happen to people, better it happen to change the system than it just keep happening.
Chris Christie's argument also absolves the racist terrorists from the weight of their choices. Human beings made the decision to lynch a fourteen year old boy for saying goodbye to a white woman. Human beings chose to murder civil rights workers, blow up a church killing little girls, assassinate people. Human beings chose to deny people their basic rights, turn hoses on crowds, wade into a march of peaceful protesters with dogs and batons. Why are the victims of the violence the ones responsible for it and not the terrorists who made the decision to commit violence on unarmed, unresisting people for simply exercising their first amendment rights? It seems to me the bad guys here are the domestic terrorists, be they assassins, bombers, criminal police, people in crowds screaming death threats at children, or all the folks who one way or another supported the system that let so many of them get away with it.
It infuriates me when I see people rewriting history to erase the terrorism and make the people who perpetrated it the good guys. It infuriates my when the heroism and sacrifice of those who suffered and sometimes died standing up to the terrorist get erased to make their sacrifices worthless and foolish. Fuck Chris Christie and the revisionists who want to turn the clock back to a much worse and scarier time in the name of "taking our country back" and "real Americans." To my way of thinking, the real Americans were the ones risking everything to demand their constitutional rights.
Chris Christie's argument also absolves the racist terrorists from the weight of their choices. Human beings made the decision to lynch a fourteen year old boy for saying goodbye to a white woman. Human beings chose to murder civil rights workers, blow up a church killing little girls, assassinate people. Human beings chose to deny people their basic rights, turn hoses on crowds, wade into a march of peaceful protesters with dogs and batons. Why are the victims of the violence the ones responsible for it and not the terrorists who made the decision to commit violence on unarmed, unresisting people for simply exercising their first amendment rights? It seems to me the bad guys here are the domestic terrorists, be they assassins, bombers, criminal police, people in crowds screaming death threats at children, or all the folks who one way or another supported the system that let so many of them get away with it.
It infuriates me when I see people rewriting history to erase the terrorism and make the people who perpetrated it the good guys. It infuriates my when the heroism and sacrifice of those who suffered and sometimes died standing up to the terrorist get erased to make their sacrifices worthless and foolish. Fuck Chris Christie and the revisionists who want to turn the clock back to a much worse and scarier time in the name of "taking our country back" and "real Americans." To my way of thinking, the real Americans were the ones risking everything to demand their constitutional rights.