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If you haven't listened to the White Lies podcast series yet, I strongly urge you to remedy that soon. What follows is a short thread inspired by one detail in this powerful, final episode. Note: at least one spoiler awaits below. npr.org/2019/06/21/734…
The detail: Elmer Cook, the man who murdered Rev. James Reeb in Selma, made a living as a loan shark. His "clientele" was almost entirely black. The Southern "heritage" he was defending when he struck Reeb, was a heritage of racial exploitation and terrorism.
Elmer Cook's livelihood was *made possible* by the structural disadvantages faced by his black neighbors. In the era of Jim Crow, they had no other choice but to turn to shady characters like Cook for funds.
His profit margin (the extent of his economic success) was indexed to the intensity of terror he could instill in his victims. Elmer Cook may have claimed he didn't want black people around, but economically speaking, he was nothing without them.
When today's "respectable" white identitarians say "we're just advocating for the interests of white people, we're not against anyone," they obscure the fact that whiteness in America has been built, almost entirely, out of the suffering & plundered labor of black people.
Plundered labor (under slavery & then Jim Crow) is what created the desperately poor black community that provided the market for Elmer Cook's "services." Cook could violently terrorize his "customers" into paying because he knew the legal system would give his white ass a pass.
It is this system of racial plunder and terror that conservative politicians referred to as "the Southern way of life" that meddling activists and do-gooder federal officials were supposedly trying to "destroy."
This podcast, produced by two white men who descend from slaveholders, serves as a brilliant model of how to learn from the past. The lessons are not easy or straightforward or unambiguous. But they are crushingly important for those working to create "a more perfect union."
It is indisputably true that Native American dispossession and exploited black labor were the grounds upon which "American prosperity" was built. That history has passed, it can not be undone. But it is essential that we account for and reckon with its lingering effects.
This podcast and the many white and black voices we hear in it offer some brilliant suggestions for how we might do the work of healing these historical scars.
