To All Cowards Who Like to Hang Nooses

I’ve held forth about noose hanging in an earlier post about Jena. But now we’ve got copycats on Long Island, and yesterday, Columbia University. I’ve got two things to say about that, but before I say anything about racism being alive and well all over the United States, even in the so-called "enlightened" cosmopolitan areas like New York City, I’ve got a message for the noose-hangers:

I’m putting this out there to anyone who has hung a noose or is planning to hang a noose to try to intimidate black people: Why don’t you show your faces and admit that you’re racists? If you feel so strongly that black people should be degraded, subjugated, treated as second-class citizens, and stripped of their civil rights, why don’t you come say it to our faces. Why don’t you stand in front of the TV cameras waving your nooses? Your sneaking around only shows you for the cowards you are. You’re the same people who leave anonymous crud on message boards and blogs because then you don’t have to say it in person and chance dealing with the consequences.

I’ve got a message for all you racist morons: Black people are no longer scared of you. We stopped being scared of you a long time ago. If we can’t peacefully march, we will sue you into the stratosphere, like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center does the KKK and other supremacy groups on a regular basis. We will continue to get into positions of power and change the laws, so that people like you, when caught, will go to jail, not just be slapped on the hand for a childish prank. You just better hope Barak Obama doesn’t get elected as president.

We are not scared of you, just bored and weary that we still have to deal with this mess.

We set foot on these shores more than 400 years ago (yes even before the first indentured servants arrived in Virginia in 1619). If you haven’t noticed, we aren’t going anywhere. You did your best to nearly kill us, throughout slavery, and after the Civil War, when we were no longer useful to you. It took 100 slow, bitter years for us to first be recognized as human beings, and not two-thirds of a man—and that took three Constitutional amendments (the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth)—to tell us something we already knew. To give us something that never belonged to anyone else in the first place, our rights as human beings. What arrogance to think otherwise. Then, with the help of other enlightened people, because it hadn’t sunk in with you bottom dwellers that we were no longer enslaved, we had to go another round, and that yielded the civil rights and voting acts of 1964 and 1965. We’ve been playing catch up ever since, and don’t have time to mess with your stupidity. You're like gnats buzzing around our heads, distracting, but ultimately something can be done about you and your kind.

Pay attention, because I’m going to only say it once: This is not 1865, this is not 1965. We done left the plantation a long time ago.

We are still here.

We are not going anywhere.

Keep hanging your nooses and eventually we will find out who you are.

Ultimately, you’re sad little people, and by your actions have shown yourselves to be ignorant, with no more moral fiber, no character, no conscience. If I didn’t find you so repugnant, I would almost feel sorry for you.