The South Shall Not Rise Again

I know the South isn't the only place where we still have outdated notions of the evils of "race-mixing" but articles like the one in today's New York Times, titled "For Some, Uncertainty Starts at Racial Identity," still makes me glad my family and I don't live anywhere near there. Here are some choice excerpts from the article, referring to Barack Obama:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Whether Mr. Obama is black, half-black or half-white often seemed to overshadow the question of his exact stand on particular issues, and rough-edged comments on the subject flowed easily even from voters who said race should not be an issue in the campaign. Many voters seemed to have no difficulty criticizing the mixing of the races — and thus the product of such mixtures — even as they indignantly said a candidate’s color held no importance for them.

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsdale, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

And how about this line:

“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

My Zen practice challenges me to have compassion for these people, but I'm sorry, these people are idiots. And it gives me a bit of pleasure knowing that no matter how much they may not like it, there is nothing they can do to stop the amount of ethnic mixing that is going on in this country and that will only increase in the years to come. Even in this New York Times article, there was an example of this:

Bud Rowell, a retired oil field worker interviewed at a Baptist church in Citronelle, Ala., north of Mobile, said he was uncertain about Mr. Obama’s racial identity, and was critical of him for being equivocal and indecisive.

But Mr. Rowell also said that personal experience had made him more sympathetic to biracial people.

“I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

Read the entire article here.