The Fourth Riding of the Ku Klux Klan

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Historians think of the KKK as having
three great “ridings.”

The first, right after the Civil War,
was designed to overcome Republican Reconstruction. The second, early
in the last century, was designed to enforce Jim Crow in the South
and racial segregation in the north. The third, in the 1950s and
1960s, was a deliberate reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Historians will write that we are
currently in a fourth riding, and ironically it's the Party of
Lincoln, the Republican Party, that is now the KKK party.

Most analysts are too polite to say
this. Even black analysts are usually too polite to say this, perhaps
because many such analysts, like Al Sharpton, have been welcomed into
the chattarati and are no longer subject to it. You get some wealth,
get some comfort, see the Klan riding off toward someone else's house
and you got to figure, hey I got mine. (Right, Dr. Carson?)

But the riding of the Klan has become
too, too obvious, especially since the 2010 elections. Republican
policies have become racist in intent, and in application. If I do
nothing else in this essay, I hope to convince you of that. It's long
past time you were convinced of that.

In Michigan, the KKK government of
Gateway founder Rick Snyder has gone so far as to disenfranchise the
state's blacks wholesale. He got a law passed that let him take over
black-majority cities and appoint his own unelected dictators in
place of those elected governments. When the law was overturned by
the voters in the 2012 election, he had a lame duck session of his
legislature reinstate it, and then used it to take over Detroit, the
largest black-run city in the state. His claim throughout has been
“financial emergency” but his intent and his impact are clear.
Black people can't be trusted with political power in their own
communities. The White Man knows best.

And it's clear he doesn't. Snyder has
been using his dictatorial power to sell assets, to wreck cities, to
try and blow black people out of their homes. He has gerrymandered
the state to guarantee continued white domination of the legislature,
throughout this decade, and if his plot works his successors will do
it again, and again, and again. The only difference between Rick
Snyder and George Wallace is his street address.

But it's not just Michigan. Racial
gerrymanders have become the law anywhere Republicans took power in
2010. Create a small number of “ghetto” districts, throwing all
the niggers and their nigger-loving liberal friends into as small a
number of districts as possible, and you can win majorities with
barely 40% of the vote. Pennsylvania and Ohio, which also became
Cracker Republics in 2010, even toyed with the idea of gerrymandering
the Presidency through this process, giving future electoral votes
based on gerrymandered Congressional districts. Had they succeeded
nationwide, Republicans would be guaranteed the White House.

This riding had been building long
before Barack Obama took the White House. I know, because I live in
Georgia.

Georgia has been resegregating as
quietly as it can for some time. It started with the creation of
“Sandy Springs,” a new city just north of Atlanta, by the
Republican Legislature about a half-decade ago. The wealthy of Sandy
Springs didn't like the fact that state law would not allow creation
of a new city next to an existing one. They didn't want to be in
Atlanta, which is majority black, and they certainly didn't like
Fulton County, which is also majority black.

So when the legislature went solidly
Republican they got their wish. And the dominoes started falling.
Pretty soon every square inch of Fulton County north of Atlanta was
in some new, fakey “city,” their taxes for police and other
services safe from the majority, which happened to be black, to the
south. And then it extended into my own county, DeKalb. White areas
are all calving off fakey cities throughout the north side of the
county – Dunwoody and Brookhaven, now Druid Hills.

What they're copying is the success of
the city to my east, Decatur. When I moved here 30 years ago Decatur
was majority-black, and had a small tax base. During the Olympics it
even had a black mayor, Elizabeth Wilson. But after the Olympics,
white folks starting moving into the south end of the city, because
it was, after all, just a few miles from Emory University and the
CDC. By the last census Decatur was majority white, north and south.

Since Decatur had long run its own
school system, the way was now clear to fancy that school system up.
There's been a huge building boom in the Decatur City Schools, which
also managed to hive themselves off from state regulation and become
a “charter system.” They also joined the International
Baccalaureate program. The result is that Decatur has become a magnet
for wealthy yuppies with kids. It also became jealous of its perks,
and is now busy kicking out kids who it formerly welcomed – black
kids from Atlanta mostly. It's a process.

The result of all this, added to the
Republican gerrymander, is full cracker government, and complete
segregation, partly racial but mostly economic. If you live in a
gentrifying neighborhood you're being priced out of the market, right
ahead of good schools coming in. No rich white folks will pay a
damned dime to support any poor black government here anymore. It's
not a bug. It's a feature.

We all saw the long voting lines last
year, and you'd think that would shame people into backing off such
nonsense. But it's only emboldened the Cracker Party to further
action, with state-after-state enacting new restrictions on voting,
new poll taxes (what else can you call a state ID that costs you
money and is required for voting), fewer voting hours, fewer voting
days, fewer voting locations in black areas, and you're free to be
put in a cage, an ultra-majority nigger district, an ultra-majority
nigger city whose government whitey may or may not countenance (fire
the school board, create new cities around the white folks to deny
the black folks the tax revenue, take over their transit system and
privatize it) but which is, in the end, impotent.

Cracker government today, cracker
government tomorrow, cracker government forever. The KKK is riding.
Do you hear it?

The passivity of the Obama
Administration in the face of this rise is frightening, galling, and
angry-fying. Probably because the courts are ready to toss the Voting
Rights Act entirely, so why bother? But not even a speech? Not a peep
of protest from the Justice Department? Who does this President think
he is, Woodrow Fucking Wilson?

Now, if you've just been reading along
here you're in for a little shock. I'm white. I'm 58. I'm married. I
should be all over this shit, it should be right up my street. I
should be putting on my hood, grabbing my gun, and joining the ride.

But I was born with a brain, I was
educated, and I learned something from my black neighbors 30 years
ago. A man's worth is measured by his opportunities. Deny him
opportunities and he becomes worthless. And all capital is, in the
end, only human capital. That's all that counts. Our economy is based
on the minds, and willing hearts, of our people, and when we restrict
opportunity to just a subset of those people, we become like a car
running on only half its cylinders. We lose power, we lose our way,
and we're ready to be buried by hungrier, even less-free nations like
China.

It is past time to call what is
happening what it is. And to see it for what it is, an imminent
threat to our prosperity and our way of life. Atlanta became a major
city, over 50 years ago, by marketing itself as the “city too busy
to hate.” If we can't become a country too busy to hate, our hatred
is going to consume us.

And ending the hatred starts with
standing up to the new KKK, the new Republican KKK, even at the risk
of being called fags, whores, nigger-lovers, and all the rest of it. Even when facing their guns.

If you won't fight for your country, for the real America of our
founding documents, and fight against the terrorists within our
nation who seek to tear it apart and nullify its promise, using the peaceful tools which are at hand, then you
don't deserve it.  

The last riding was beaten. This one can be, too. But only if people are willing to stand up to it.