chunks of flommus
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‘stevie wonder is ok. he’s blind.’

I was 7 years old and equal parts confused and pleased that my (at the time) extremely racist dad was allowing me to watch a pop music video (these that he angrily dismissed as “n****r music” with a tone that was almost entirely contempt) even if the reason he was giving didn’t really make much sense.

My father was stridently racist from a life lived on the kind of rails that would have made any other result unlikely if completely impossible. He was raised in the kind of small Iowa farming town where you didn’t have to actively hate blacks because you’d never see one in the first place.

It was a “sundown town” until 1979, and proudly. If you can imagine a world where everyone had seen Star Wars and black people weren’t allowed to own property let alone be in town after dark, then that’s the perverse Twilight Zone episode that incubated my dad.

My father had a head full of bad ideas that had to be road-tested out. But back to Stevie Wonder’s blindness …

“Stevie Wonder is OK. He’s blind.”

I never asked my dad what he meant by that but I never forgot it. What I feel like he was saying based on what he said and how he said it is that Stevie’s lack of sight paid off some of the original sin of him being a black man in the first place. That’s the lesson I took from it anyway. And it was a lesson I’d see reinforced over the years growing up in Bellevue, Nebraska.

Bellevue is a small suburb of Omaha and the oldest city in Nebraska. It’s essentially part-bedroom community part-base housing for the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command next door. We moved there when I was 5 to take advantage of its superior school district. We didn’t really have any money but Bellevue was cheap and this was a micro-Slums of Beverly Hills way to get us into better schools. It was also (owing to that same air force base) a much more mixed community racially, a mix that also extended to our schools.

It’s a cliche by now that children aren’t inherently racist and that is true. It was also the tail end of the 1970s when all the Aquarian post-hippies and PBS types were making sure we knew about the civil rights movement and Dr King etc. Having black friends wasn’t something you thought about, it was just something you did.

But over time I saw that same attitude my father had toward Stevie Wonder played out again and again by teachers, by coaches, by adult relatives, by other parents. I saw it foremost in the concept of ‘the good ones.’ You know where I’m going with this. The tired racial cliche about X being ‘one of the good ones,’ a litmus test never applied to other whites.

Black people were born with a debt, and the debt of that original sin needed to be paid. With talent (athletic prowess being the most valuable), mental and verbal (read: white) articulation (doubly offensive since its couched in shock that blacks should even be capable of it in the first place), threat-neutering disability (hey Stevie!), or personal acquiescence to all the above racist tropes. There’s a reason so many totally-not-racist whites love that Chris Rock bit. You know the one.

As we got through Jr High and into High School and we were all steeped in the same cultural bullshit as our parents, this theory I had became more defined around the edges. Black athletes were given a temp pass so long as they understood on some subliminal level that they were representing All Blacks and as such shouldn’t act too black. The same went for black people entering the armed forces. I couldnt help but get the sense from how they were included and sometimes not included that there was an unspoken understanding that they were paying down the original sin of their color.

If you’re still reading at this point, that’s where I am going with this: White supremacy isn’t just about using racial epithets. You don’t have to use the n‑word or burn a cross to be a white supremacist. It’s much more insidious than that.

White supremacy is not listening to people of color when they tell you what it is to live as a PoC in America in 2017.

White supremacy is supporting a presidential candidate with white nationalists in his inner circle.

White supremacy is equating Black Lives Matter with the KKK or the Nazis for daring to stand up to the KKK and the Nazis.

And white supremacy is absolutely letting that shit slide from acquaintances, friends, and family members. You don’t need a white polo and a citronella torch to be a white supremacist.

We need to do better and we need to expect the people we associate with to *be* better.

—jason malmberg