Dispatch #78 White Lesbian Age 68 Considers White Supremacy License to Kill Black People

September 3rd 2020

Day 1395 Post-Ascendency of White Supremacy & Misogyny

 Day 1322 Post-Installation of White Supremacist-Misogynist-Pussy-Grabbing-Self-Aggrandizing-Demagogic-Bully-Illegitimate-PeeeOTUS & his White-Nationalist-Fascistic-Christian-Supremacist-Quislings

One Thousand Three Hundred and Ninety-Two Days since the majority of white Americans chose white supremacy and misogyny rather than elect a woman President.  We cannot forget how the toxic foundation of America enabled fascism and hate to rule.

Sixty-one days until November 3rd Election Day 2020. We must elect Democrats up and down the ballot without exception right NOW.  And then we return to work for justice.

And then we will continue to demand transformational change.  We white people must accept/learn the memory/knowledge about our country’s violent white supremacist and genocidal culture. We white people must continue our work to understand and advocate for the enormous change necessary to dismantle White Supremacy and make Reparations.

In their NYT essay titled “The Massacre that Emboldened White Supremacists -- The 1873 murders of dozens of former slaves in a flyspeck Louisiana town still reverberate,” William Briggs and Jon Krakauer begin with these paragraphs:

An hour after sunset on Easter Sunday in 1873, a stern-wheel riverboat put ashore at Colfax, La., a ramshackle settlement surrounded by cotton plantations on the east bank of the Red River. Rain was falling. As passengers disembarked, they found themselves stumbling in the dark over what turned out to be the lifeless bodies of African-Americans who had been freed from slavery eight years earlier at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Most of the dead were lying facedown in the grass “and had been shot almost to pieces,” according to Charles Lane in his book “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.” Others had been bludgeoned or mutilated, and some had burned to death. Flames rose from the ruins of the parish courthouse. The stench of charred human flesh was inescapable.

As Americans debate the merit of tearing down monuments to founding fathers, a monument to the men who massacred Black Americans in Colfax 147 years ago stands unopposed and largely unnoticed. Two blocks off Main Street, a 12-foot marble obelisk is the focal point of the Colfax cemetery. An inscription carved into its base declares it was “erected to the memory of the heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.” On the north side of the present-day courthouse, a historical marker reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain” and added that the episode “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

These memorials to the perpetrators of mass murder are disturbing enough in their own right. But the impact of the Colfax massacre extended far beyond this flyspeck town. The damage is still felt acutely throughout our entire nation, and the tragedy must not be forgotten. www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/opinion/black-lives-civil-rights.html

Briggs and Krakauer describe the events leading up to the massacre – white supremacist anti-black/anti-Reconstruction violence rampaging across the South, contested elections in Colfax eventually awarded to Republican candidates sympathetic to black freedmen, homicidal revolt by supporters of Democrats – and the massacre itself:

Several hundred heavily armed white supremacists from throughout Louisiana traveled to Colfax bent on taking control of the courthouse, prompting local freedmen to gather in the brick building and defend it from attack, even though they were vastly outgunned. When the white mob advanced, the murderous frenzy of their assault prompted the Black men to raise a flag of surrender, but the berserk marauders ignored it. They set fire to the courthouse roof and slaughtered almost every freedman who emerged from the flaming building to surrender. Those who remained inside were burned alive. The exact number of victims was never determined.

Briggs and Krakauer recount how efforts to establish criminal accountability in federal court were dismissed in 1876 by a Supreme Court decision stating that the 14th Amendment did not apply to acts of racist violence by private citizens against other citizens. This case, US vs Cruikshank, established judicial precedent that severely limited the power of the federal government to prosecute violent crimes against the formerly enslaved.

A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African-Americans in Selma and Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s; to the present-day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson, Mo.,Charlottesville, Va., and now Kenosha, Wis.; to the shameful, plain-sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections. Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember Colfax and the lasting harm it wrought. www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/opinion/black-lives-civil-rights.html

Winning on November 3rd is a critical step, but, just one step.

It’s not about supplication, it’s about power.  It’s not about asking, it’s about demanding. It’s not about convincing those who are currently in power, it’s about changing the very face of power itself.  Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw