Response To Hate Speech

storp-discrimination

I am so used to hate speech and sometimes hate crimes carried out for any number of reasons that it is now in my blood. I’ve been trying to stop them since I was five years old and saw Hiroshima Maidens, civilians, in NYC for reconstructive surgery for missing body parts.

The War Was Won Before Hiroshima—And the Generals Who …

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/

Aug 6, 2015 – The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.… in … in 1946 that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…

This event of my seeing these severely harmed women was my “wake-up call.” Nobody, and I mean nobody, can stop me now in my desire to stop hatred and dismissal of others, ones outside of my so-called group (the one to which others have assigned me based on certain traits that I have) since the largest span of my life has been dedicated to removing harm starting from that point in time when I was a young child.

In fact I don’t care one whit about someone’s reason for hating and desecrating others. I don’t care one whit whether it is done simply verbally or in other ways.

Likewise I do not care whether hate acts carried out because of a religious difference, a diet difference (i.e., beef eating), a skin tone difference, a cultural or ethnic difference, nationality difference or any other sorts of difference. Indeed the causes for hatred are far too myriad in number to list and are immaterial to me.

Accordingly, I will reject the hater’s stance against another group and, simultaneously, be willing, ready and able to even protect another’s life with my own as my friend Mary did during a peace march at a biological/chemical weapons facility when she literally flung her body on top of an obviously gay person, a stranger to her, in the march to prevent him from being beaten possibly to death by police. (Her action landed her in jail, but probably saved his life.)

Would you undertake this action if someone were being beaten to death in front of you? Consider the action, please. I know that I would.

So given my unwavering stance,  it is with dismay that I read this news item:

Professors: It’s Not Okay To Be White,11/13/17, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-13/professors-its-not-okay-be-white

Frankly I don’t give a damn about which imaginary monsters that someone personally may hate. It can be Jews, whites, blacks, Muslims, poor white-person rednecks and hicks, people from the LBGT community (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender), Dalits, Adivasis, other natives or whomever else that one targets.

Certainly I don’t care a bit about whomever is the target of hate. I simply know that the brutality toward others, especially innocent civilians, needs to stop.

With this consideration in mind,  I wrote and sent an email to the professor who hates white people according to the article at the above link. I was adamant in my thrust to try to correct his erroneous views. Accordingly, my writing to him went something like this:

Shalom Ekow,

My friend of ten years, who posts my writings, recently added this one to his website:

FYI: Hate Crimes — Especially Against Muslims — Went Up In 2016: FBI
by Abdus Sattar Ghazali

https://countercurrents.org/2017/11/16/hate-crimes-especially-against-muslims-went-up-in-2016-fbi/
Incidents of hate crimes, particularly against African-Americans, Jews and Muslims, went up to 6,121 during 2016, seeing an increase of 4.6 percent compared to the previous year, according to data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday (Nov. 13).

Meanwhile, you —  yes — you — are creating violence and othering by spreading hateful views while forgetting:

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a

Accordingly, you need to talk to your Rabbi and undertake some act of atonement — a reparation of sorts — for your hateful views about whites to cleanse yourself of travesty. Please do this for your own heart  so as to heal yourself from hatred. Do not do this for me or other white people, whom you malign, stereotype and “other.”

Who do you want to hate? Is it my brother-in-law, this fellow? … He laid his life literally on the line when in Laos checking on refugee camps without financial recompense based on people at International Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland asking him to do inspections. No, he received no money for the action and had derisive guards, laughing ones, casually pointing machine guns at him during the process while demonstrating hair-trigger reactions ready to shoot him at a moment’s notice.

Have you the inner fortitude to help others as did my murdered childhood friend, Andrew Goodman, whose living brother David is an acquaintance of mine? …

Andy’s Story – Andrew Goodman Foundation

https://andrewgoodman.org/who-we-are/about-andy/

In a school paper, Andrew Goodman wrote, “the Senators could not persist in this … James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

Brother-in-law:

… the Director of the  County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, has served as Director from 1999 to the present.

He also served on the National Institute of Corrections Advisory Board.

  • 1994-2004 Appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno.
  • 2010-2013 Appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder

As a member of the Adjunct Faculty, he  teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Corrections, Administration of Justice and related topics.at :

  • University of Maryland University College
  • Montgomery College, Maryland

He was also an Adjunct Faculty member at:

  •  Temple University, University of Washington, and  St. Joseph’s University (graduate)

Other professional and academic work includes:

  • Attended Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service (BS), and University of Pennsylvania (MA) with major fields – International Relations and Foreign Policy.
  • Co-authored a university text in International Organizations and the United Nations – serving as an intern with  the Department of State – Bureau of Southern African Affairs and performing field work in Southern Africa.
  • Did further field work on the Thai – Cambodian Border – refugee reunification after the Khmer Rouge Genocide and wrote on Humanitarian Parole for the US Committee on Refugees.
  • Wrote refugee reunification casework for Wrightstown Friends Meeting Asian Refugee Committee – Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
  • Served as Captain, US Army Reserve, Military Intelligence and Infantry – Leadership Montgomery Graduate, Class of 2001.

==========

Do you have the inner strength of my white sister, his wife, who could have been killed for her actions if one of the teens had had a gun?

One day driving down a four laned highway to take her teenage daughter to a soccer game in which the child was involved, she saw two teen boys on the opposite side of the highway kicking, punching and hitting another boy in the grass.

So she turned her car around, brought it to their location, locked its doors and told the boys that her daughter locked in the car had a cell phone to call police if commanded to do so. Then she told them to stop.

Scared of her force and the severe look on her face, they did so. Then she followed one of them home after having checked that the injured boy was okay and not in need of medical help beyond her initial first aid assessment.

She wanted to know whether either of his parents were home. Not finding them so, she talked to the boy about accruing a criminal record and his luck that she, wife of a prison director, had intervened when she did so to prevent him from making a big mistake.

She explained some assault facts that scared him. I bet that he won’t in some sort of rage towards another person do something stupid again.

So her daughter was late to a soccer game. Who cares? The gain was worth the cost in time in my opinion. – From The Good Sister, A Model For US All!

Here’s another white person for you to hate and malign:
Mary, Protector Of The Harmed

You can also in your hate-of-whites orientation attack Scott, a pacifist Catholic Worker who runs a homeless shelter out of his home as a charity and based solely on donations given to him to help his guests. He used his body as a human shield to protect Bosnians (whose skin color and ethnic background made no difference to him since he’d do this for anyone under threat) against Serb machine gun fire, just as my brother-in-law did in Laos. Do you hate this white person, too, due to his skin tone? … Catholic Worker Movement – Wikipedia

I imagine that you hate me, whose been “uppity” since being a child. I’m just too white and awful, I suppose:

In support of the Selma March, I, a blond white living in Sarasota, FL at age 13 (1963), was collecting Green Stamps from strangers after school at a grocery store. Then I’d ride my bike home with them (around two miles) and paste them into booklets to send to my friend, Jackie M. (whose German father started Dannon, a struggling company in the 1960’s, and who’d endured WWII events as a German Jewish child).

She’d turn them over to her father [yes. a German Jew who had escaped death in a concentration camp] and he had made arrangements to turn them over to a bus company for FREE N/C rides out of NYC to Selma, Alabama for protests. … Time was of the essence so I worked like the devil to get as many stamps as I could day after day. (Their existence was a free perk from the grocery market.) … Do you think that it could be fun to be a 13 year old collecting and pasting stamps for hours on end each day?

One day, a white couple asked about the reason for my collecting. Then I got spit on IN THE FACE and sworn at. I drove my bike home crying and shaking. I also decided to NOT tell my parents since they might forbid me to return to the action as it could be dangerous to me.

I decided, too, that I will NOT be intimidated. I would not be cowed any more than would be my two Freedom Rider friends, Irwin Wadler and Andy Goodman of whom the latter was beaten, bludgeoned and and kicked to death while Freedom Riding a year later. So I was out there the next day scared to death while collecting more Green Stamps.

You think I’m some white blond 67 year old Honky or something?  First of all, I’m going to tell you that I am a Masai. That’s right. I became one through my father, who is of Scottish descendancy. And if anyone messed with me, I’d have some of my brothers come over from Kenya without their spears and give a tongue-lashing (because the Masai are really good in language skills) the likes of which few people have seen. – From Statement And Counterstance: Racism In The USA – Countercurrents

Let me tell you a little secret, Buddy. I don’t give a darn that you hate me for my whiteness any more than I give a darn about being spit in the face by white supremacists or being called a “honky.” It’s because I’m so seasoned by years and years of rejecting the bigotry that you represent whether aimed at blacks, whites, religiously different people, ethnically different people and so on.

In the same vein, I’d act like my white friend, Mary, who threw herself on top of a person, during a police beat-up to save his life and for which she ended in jail. Why — I’d even do it for you — fling on top of you. So shame on you for your erroneous views of all whites. Yes, adamantly — SHAME ON YOU!

I’ll add that the following text, Lawrence Cahoone’s, resonates deeply with me:
“Lawrence Cahoone (1996) explains othering thusly:

 ‘What appear to be cultural units—human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations—are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is ‘privileged’ or favored, and the other is devalued in some way.’

“It has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude ‘Others’ who they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. For example, Edward Said’s book Orientalism demonstrates how this was done by western societies—particularly England and France—to ‘other’ those people in the ‘Orient’ who they wanted to control. The concept of ‘otherness’ is also integral to the understanding of identities, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an ‘other’ as part of a fluid process of action-reaction that is not necessarily related with subjugation or stigmatization.”

In any case, we are all quite capable of too readily seeing negative traits that we personally abhor in “The Other” rather than accepting and supporting whomever or whatever we imagine exemplifies these qualities. In this manner, some Catholics hate and fear Protestants, some Jews hate and fear Arabs, some Muslims hate and fear Americans, some Whites hate and fear darker skinned peoples and so it goes like a merry-go-round with each person and social group denigrating and abhorring the next rather than being inclusive.

In such a fashion, the mind set of us VS. them keeps circling around and around to create an inordinate amount of deep lasting misery. All the while, hatred and rejection are being taught in the process to each successive generation of perpetrators and victims alike.

Perhaps you imagine that my half-Jewish daughter is acceptable to you. She works very hard as a guidance counselor — the only one in a school of 350 children — a person who is following my path to improve life in the world in her own way. Perhaps my sister’s half Jewish son, an EMT who saves lives, is acceptable, but perhaps her two adopted white children, who are also striving to improve the world, are not to you due to their skin color and genetic background.

In the end, you need to stop being divisive. Your hatred of whites and whatever else you may hate will destroy yourself by eating you up alive and it will harm the world in irreparable ways. How can you, as a faithful Jew, justify that  ugly, unconscionable orientation?

Do you really want to support hate crimes against whites like my sister and me, Scott and Mary or a fragile blind Irish nun, aged 82, who was jailed for protesting against an industrial-military complex? Be my guest if that is your bent, but know that you can’t. absolutely can’t, stop us from expressing our deepest ethics, sense of compassion and sense of purpose in life regardless of whom you choose to be in YOUR own, possibly discrepant values and personal thrust forward in life.

Be deviant from me or not in your values and orientation. It matters not since you can’t intimidate me and you can’t stop my alternative thrust to go forward in life with inclusiveness.

In the end, it is really simple choice that you can make .It’s a no-brainer. Do you want your hatred or do you like this pictured alternative as part of the future in the world? Pick!

kids

In the end, hate — hate all that you want to hate — and to the degree that you want it. Your fury of hatred will consume you, but not me as you influence people to go against me based in your rhetoric about my skin color..

Your stance is of no consequence to me regardless of your dislike of me based on my skin tone. It is because I will continue on my current bent until I either get senile or die.

I have no choice, unlike you, in relation to hatred since I’ve been strongly honed to be the way that I am since age five and saw those awfully dismembered Japanese Hiroshima Maidens. Do you think that I’d care, as a five year old, whether they were Asian, black skinned, white skinned or something in between? Would I care about their economic status, their nationality or their followed religion, etc.?

In my being,  I’m, in short, set in stone early-on unlike you who can change course if you can mend your ways. Personally I can’t do so and refuse the option of changing my course of action.

However, there is still time for you to alter course. I sincerely hope that you will do so.

Kindly,

Sally Dugman is a writer from MA, USA.

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