Notes from a confederate rally

They wore their history—in particular, their intergenerational defeat and ongoing public humiliation—on their faces. Fuck those absurdly wealthy and culturally hostile scalawags at the Southern Poverty Law Center — here was the true Southern poverty, the generations of want and suffering and being scapegoated and trying to scratch out an existence in a conquered land where their conquerors seek to scratch them out of existence.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War ended, here was a perpetually maligned demographic that had witnessed almost everything, including their dignity, being stripped from them...

And then, finally, came what the party-crashers were looking for. A genetically challenged-looking ginger male in a pink baseball cap called a black girl a “greasy monkey nigger bitch.” The black girl in question, who was wearing a shirt celebrating her “blackness,” began howling and screaming and clawing and swinging like a Jerry Springer guest before cops were able to restore order. Her friend, a portly black woman with a giant black leather earring in the shape of Mother Africa, shouted at someone in the crowd, “What if I called you a greasy inbred stringy-haired cracker?”

“I’d be offended,” they replied.

“But ‘cracker’ isn’t offensive!” she insisted.

“Shouldn’t that be for the crackers to decide?” I asked her. She either didn’t hear me or she didn’t want to answer the question. Maybe she simply assumed it was for her to decide what was offensive and what wasn’t.