I could have been a white terrorist…

The summer after my freshman year of college there was a cottonmouth bloom. The county was covered with the snakes. I did not go much of anywhere that summer without my .410, by no means an overly intimidating shotgun, but one none the less. Dawn and dusk walks around the fields, bag full of shells, always taking out one or two, some times over a dozen. Sometimes close enough to the road to wave at passing cars. For a few weeks my walks coincided with the African American Church’s weeknight meetings so that there I was walking the field edge with a shotgun, there they were driving by. At points I would drive by their church, a white clapboard building, as the gospel choir sang and I would slow down to listen… then, gun next to me in the seat, I would rev off down the road, the beat up farm truck I drove lacked a second gear and had to be popped from first to third. Never, for a moment, did it occur to me that a white guy with a gun patrolling his family farm, that a white guy with a gun sitting outside a church, could be taken as anything other than innocent. I could have been a white terrorist.

 

How crazy would have this assumption been on their part?

I had access to guns, they knew I had access to guns. That they only ever saw my .410 meant little. I had at least one gun, and I had no problem casually wondering about with it. Truth be told I had access to lots of guns. Shotguns, rifles, hand guns, riot guns, the lot was at my disposal… at some point that summer I shot each and everyone of them. My family does not stockpile guns, compared to most of my neighbors we did not have a lot, but we had plenty.

There are white terrorist in my family. Almost every day that summer I talked to members of my extended family who had killed African American men, served time for doing it, not mind you for murder but much lesser charges. These acts are part of the known history of the community, known but never mentioned. I have family spread out across several southern states and in each community I know who to go to if I want to meander into the world of white supremacy and the terrorism that flows out of it. Start sifting through the kids I knew as a child, those numerous 4th, 5th, and 6th cousins, and one will discover more than one adult that now walks that walk, talks that talk of white supremacy... A toss of the dice of who happened to be around to hang out with on any given summer... those ones and not the ones I did befriend… well a lot of my life might be different.

It is not a matter of mental stability, lack of drug use, or any other set of alleged reasons that kept me from being a white terrorists. It was a matter of not falling out of the general miasma of racism in which I was surrounded and into one of the dark pits of active white supremacy with its violent racists actions, past, present, and future. I kept away from those pits because I had other options. I went to a private school in the city, I got caught up in diverse crowds, I started going to Boy Scout Camp instead of being on the farm, I voraciously read books from all across the spectrum of view points… That I found a way out is not miraculous, it is the norm... the potential, however, was consistently and latently there. That latent potential was present in my life growing up and I do not think my experience is exceptionally unique for a southern white male... our rare conversations on the issue involve too much acknowledgement of things left unsaid.

It has been a long process from the racist miasma in which I was formed to the space I am in today. A lot of steps from that point to this one, a lot of more steps for me personally to go… I am not certain of how many steps it would have been from that miasma to actually taking up violent acts of racism, especially lethal acts of white terrorism… but I can easily look back at my life now and see a series of available steps and possible associations that could have brought me to that very place. Recognizing this terrible capacity in myself and in my surroundings is not easy, it is not pretty, it is not something that I want to admit. But if white southern men like me do not start acknowledging that potential, acknowledging that latent capacity in the world in which we live and breathe... then nothing will change, that potential will remain, and we will continue to shed the life blood of African Americans, as we have done from the moment we planted our first crops on American soil.

Once I was a white man, standing on the edge of my field, with a gun, watching African Americans drive home from church… and not for a moment did I think this should bother any one. I could have been a white terrorist.