Sometimes you have to say it out loud in order for the truth to penetrate, to register, to enter the heart.  If you are able, for whatever reason or rationalization, to support the president after Charlottesville and the pronouncement following several days later about the “good people” among the alt-right demonstrators,–you are a racist.  It is unlikely that you mean to be, but you are.

Of course no one is born a racist, or anything else.  We come into this world primed to adapt and to survive.  We make ourselves by adapting to our environment, and by self reflection upon the layers of remembered experience. Some are remembered consciously, but the majority are retained below the reach of consciousness, in the body.  We are taught what to love and what to hate.  We love and hate along grooves formed in childhood.

I grew up in the South.  By dint of luck I was spared schooling to hate people of color.  With a double helping of luck I experienced a wonderful education.  Especially from exposure to philosophy and history I learned of my heritage as a standard-issue-human being.  Our heritage has innumerable contributions from saints and sinners of every race, every culture, every age since the inception of recorded history.

I learned that my great uncle Thomas McLamb was in the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of Robert E. Lee.  Unfortunately for him my uncle was struck in the eye with a spent minne ball at Kelly’s Ford Virginia.  He was especially unlucky because he lived for some time with the ball in his head, grievously wounded, suffering.  Thomas was among those who paid for defending injustice.  He paid an inestimable price with the rest of the South which was burned and starved from the Mississippi to the Atlantic ocean.  I doubt that he had any residue of patriotic nostalgia for the lost cause.  Uncle Thomas did not own a slave.

For several years I was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  I benefited from the opportunity to learn more about the South, and “the war” by my association with those men.  I visited a number of battlefields, Gettysburg, Antietam, Petersburg, Fort Fisher.  I’ll never forget what I saw and felt at the Devils Den on the battlefield at Gettysburg.  My imagination supplied the crackle of musket fire, and the corpses of slain and the dying.  While enjoying the fellowship and what I learned by association with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I perceived that some of them would be happy for another opportunity to “settle-up” with the North, to re-ignite the war.  I could not share their grief and anger at having “lost.”  I discontinued my membership.

I have a Confederate battle flag folded in the bottom of a dresser drawer.  It is going to remain there.  I feel a rush of nostalgia when I hear The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band.  I will always love that song.  I cannot help it.

If you are supporting a man who endorsed those who demonstrated in Charlottesville, behind Confederate battle flags, and Nazi symbols—think about it.  None of us were born to hate, racism can be unlearned.

These words by Emerson express my existential sense of my life at this juncture.

” I am God in Nature; I am a weed by the wall.”  

——from Circles by Ralph Waldo Emerson