,
15 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Imagine thinking John Lewis wasn't from the Deep South. Imagine saying it out loud. Imagine saying any of this out loud.
As a doctoral student in history, I had to train myself not to say "the South" when I meant "the white South," because the South is not just the white South, and never has been. America is not white America.
And this isn't just about race. Lloyd Doggett was born in Texas, to parents born in Texas. He was student body president at UT Austin, and a member of the Texas state legislature for 12 years. Of course he's from Texas.
This idea that only conservatives can be "real" Southerners, that only whites and the native-born can be "real" midwesterners—it's unamerican, is what it is.
I'm from New York City. I was born and raised in upper Manhattan. You know what that makes me? An American. What else could I be?
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are Midwesterners. Of course they are. Tlaib was born in Detroit, for chrissakes.
We have a term for the idea that people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar can't be Midwesterners, no matter what they do, where they live, where they were born or raise their children. That term is white supremacy.
Because when you say that Tlaib, born and raised in Detroit, or Omar, living in Minneapolis since her early teens, can't be Midwesterners, you're saying they can't really be fully American, can't really be full citizens. That they can never fully belong where they're from.
This is the logic that leads to saying that Trump, who won millions of votes fewer than Clinton, represents America, speaks for America, in a way that she does not—because his supporters are "American" in a way that hers were not.
And this way of thinking is insidious precisely because it's so frequently expressed and so rarely challenged. We hear the white South called "the South." We hear it over and over again. We can't hear it, we hear it so much.
It's killing us, this bigotry. It's killing us.
And by the way, yes, I said it wasn't just about race, but of course it's primarily about race. White supremacy perpetuates itself not just by defining non-whites as other, but by making pronouncements as to which whitenesses are legitimate and which are not.
(Lloyd Doggett put forward the law that established Texas's civil rights enforcement commission in 1983. But he's Not From Texas.)
And I don't mean all this as an attack on Weisman. This poison is in us all. Some of us more than others. But it's in us all.
...and just in case the poison at the root of this wasn't absolutely clear, I've now got someone in my mentions telling me that the reason Tlaib, Omar, Doggett, and Lewis aren't Midwestern/Southern is that they're "cosmopolitans."
