This old Alabama honky sez, when Donald Trump and his legions say the 2020 presidential election was stolen, they mean it was stolen by blacks

Carlottesville, Virginia 

Confederate monuments removal protest

led to

    As I pondered some new sport to banish care, something that reminded me of the bunker buster movie, “The Brother From Another Planet", about which I was schooled by white street kids when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, showed up in my email from a white guy named Coleman, who did serious time in prison, and now he has his own Substack. 

    What Coleman and a deep thinking black dude tag teamer wrote about what calling someone a Nigga really means is really long. I provide the beginning and a link that can be opened to the whole thing. This is an interesting look at what being called a Nigga really means. Yet, I wonder if something much bigger and pressing was getting a free pass, and I addressed that in my second comment, which Coleman and his guest commentator and other readers did not touch, so far. 

A Convict’s Perspective   

Racist S#!t 

https://indamidle.substack.com/p/racist-st

Coleman and Torrance Stephens, PhD 

When a PHD and a GED set out to make everyone Big Mad

Preface: (Yeah, I do those now)

I wanted to approach this topic with more than simply what I had to offer. That's why I hit up Torrance for a helping hand. From having read his work, I came to understand that we started out in a similar world. Here was a man who also lived that life and got out. What's even better is how he did it.

Torrance got out the right way. The cliche is that I, being the white kid, would've worked my way out and became a doctor while the black guy learned through prison. Yet we're the opposite of the narratives we're all told. 

He saw that life and made himself a better man in spite of it and clawed his way out. I, on the other hand, fully embraced it and survived through sheer luck. That gives us a pair of perspectives our respective races “aren't supposed to have” and I think that's absolutely fantastic for this topic.

The perspectives of a black PHD and a white GED

That said, let's discuss that which shall not be mentioned.

Let's roll dog. 

Gimme that mic, a honky is about to talk about racism. I've included the following evacuation procedures to assist any readers who believe I can't speak on this topic:

•Safely stop your work. Shut down equipment that could become unstable or present a hazard.....

Leave the building through the nearest door with an EXIT sign..…

•Go jump in front of a bus…..

I’m going to skip the fact that I spent many years around actual race gangs and save that for another time. For this I'm going to focus on how I grew up in the PJ's. I don't mean a poor neighborhood, I mean them streets. The kind of neighborhoods where you couldn't have a pizza delivered to your house. Where the police didn't patrol because they took random gunfire while at stop lights. Where the corner stores had bullet proof glass for the criminals and steel doors for the cops. The kind of neighborhood where was one of the few white kids.

So let's start with a hang-up a lot of people seem to have.

The first 30-odd years of my life I used and answered to “Nigga” just like everyone else did where we lived. Be mad, stay mad. People on the outside looking in never understood that word. I'm so tired of hearing uptight bougie talking-heads moaning, “if the N-word is so offensive, then why do they use it in their rap music and say it 50 times in every sentence?”. Because fuck you, that's why. If you can't tell the difference between there, their and they're, then you're in over your head.

Bill Beshlian

Bill’s Substack

Excellent gentlemen. I believe this is the explanation most could listen to.

Argo the Second

The Professional Amateur

Two guys in suits. Hard part of town. Throwing gang signs on camera.

The reactions would be peak entertainment.

An K.

As a white immigrant women, I learned that the undertones, the understanding or "weight" of words have a totally different meaning for people depending on where they came from, what they have been through.

The day we realize that we have fallen victim ( division by class, race and even religion ..) to a system that is not meant to work for human kind but to exploit it and that it is not just done with hard work but with kindness, understanding and tolerance will be the day that we will be truly free.

I cannot understand or even grasp what people have been through, I have not walked in their shoes.

I know that it's been hard for most, twisted by crazy sociatal unspoken and spoken rules, an inhumane system, causing unrealistic expectations, fear and hate.

Fear mongering and propaganda are a succesful trap.

Judgment and condemnation have got to stop. 

We should remember that most of us just want a peaceful existence.

It will be up to each one of us. Every day.

It's we the people not them people.

All we can do is stop passing it on, stop spreading the hate, arrogance and ignorance, try to help when possible and be the change.

Kill'em with kindness. 

Thank you!!

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

I was born and raised in an affluent white family in the upscale white  Birmingham, Alabama suburb Mountain Book, which in time earned the nickname, The Tiny Kingdom, which is pretty much how I view it today. 

The day I was born,  a woman whose parents had been plantation slaves in Alabama came to my parents’ home looking for work, and she was hired, and her name was Charlotte Washington, but I could not pronounce Charlotte as a tot, and I called her “Cha”,  pronounced “Sha”, and that stuck, and that’s what everyone who came to our home called her, too. 

Her cooking was divine. She washed and ironed all of our clothes. She loved me as one of her own. In time, I came to see, if she had not been there when I was growing up, I would have been in really deep shit in many important ways.

Cha is the second person I memorialized in A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known (2004), which I self-published and had reprinted several times, as I kept giving copies away. Today it's a free read at the internet library, archive.org. Her chapter is entitled, “She worked behind the scenes.” https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210

We had other black servants who came “over the mounntain” from Birmingham to work in our home and take care of the yard. Cha cooked them lunch, which usually included turnip greens, sweet potato, black-eyed peas, cornbread and a meat. I never ate it, and one day when I was hungry and asked Cha to fix me something to eat, she said to try what she had fixed the servants, who were eating there in our kitchen. I said, “I don’t eat no nigger food.” When my mother heard about that, she gave me bloody hell. 

Today, I eats lots of sweet potato and collard greens dishes, which I prefer to white folks food. I speak southern English, redneck, and dialect, and sumtimes I mixes dems up. I went through a time of being  racist, but I grew out of it. I never once heard no white man be called a Nigga, until I read your exposition. Live and learn. 

 

Sean’s Substack

Sloan Bashinsky, you have a fabulous name. You should be a character in a novel with so excellent a name!

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Thanks, that’s hilarious, actually :-) Perhaps my entire life is a novel, in which I have had many experiences that can be believed, and many experiences that maybe only a batshit crazy person might believe?

It turned out that I became a writer, after all else failed :-), and I came to wonder if my father ever wished he had not suggested that I take a typing course my freshman year in a Birmingham public high school? 

Bashinsky is the Englishized spelling of my Polish Jew great grandfather Leopold’s last name. He came to America in the late 1800s. Quite an interesting man I only met through handed down family stories. However, I did know his Southern Baptist wife somewhat. Her father was a former officer in the Confederate Army. She was a school teacher. She and Leopold decided to raise their children in the Baptist church, in Troy, Alabama, where they both had ended up and met. Their son Leo married a woman from Memphis, Tennessee, whose family had Sloan as last first names, which completes the loop of how I got my name. I memorialized Leopold in the “He was a nobel creation” chapter of A Few Remarkable Alabama People I Have Known. https://archive.org/details/a-few-remarkable-alabama-people-i-have-known_202210

Many of my books, three novels, the rest non-fiction bordering on stranger than fiction, are free reads at arcive.org. Enter Sloan Bashinsky in the search space and icon links for my books come up and can be opened by clicking on the icons. The free internet library specializes in out of print books and books by authors not seeking payment. The free library is funded and operated by American colleges. Thanks to modern technology, the free library’s books can be read in English and around 35 other languages.

Crixcyon

I am so glad I don't engage in this racist nonsense. You tend to see and think racism because you are taught to always think and see racism. You can hardly read anything in the news without the descriptors being used such as; race, color, creed, wealth or lack thereof, employment, living conditions, place of residence, past history, age, schooling...etc. Humans are humans and that's as far as it should go.

Kristin , MSN, RN, CCRN

Heal: The Intensive Care of You

Yo! Thank you from a white girl who grew up in a low income housing project, where I was one of many minorities. 

I got hit a lot, but only by the parents I love and who otherwise are great people. A lot of people need to be hit with the truth they don’t ever want to hear. 

Openly Fae

Hermetic Musings

I've also had the "privilege" to be in the crowd of white folk allowed to use that word, although since I no longer live around the areas I was granted that, I have since switched to "my ninja" unless I'm singing along to actual rap.

I too have been the "designated whitey" - especially driving. I can pull stunt driver level stuff and no one notices a whitey doing ten over unless they're reckless.

And like you said, we could carry anything anywhere. I didn't usually, but I had lots of white friends who were willing. I liked my hands clean as possible.

Now when people know me at all - and I mostly keep to myself - I can mask up most of my street time and come across as straight edge, mass-produced office fodder.

But just because I left the street don't mean it left me. People best not let me catch them exploiting or hurting people. Then the skills come back out, you know?

Yosef Hirsh

Searching for Solomon

Not sure why but I read this article in my head to a hip-hop beat.

Grand Moff Porkins

Years ago, in my mostly white city, I heard “Check yo self, nigga!” I looked up as the only black man on the street made a slight head turn, then the Colemanesque young white man repeated his request, and it was clear he was talking to another white man. I got what he meant. Maybe he was LARPING, but if so, he had it down. Gotta commit to the bit.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

I commented here previously, and it kept nagging me that I had not said it’s my impression, that when Trump and his MAGAs say the 2020 presidential election was stolen, they mean it was stolen by blacks. Wnen I see photos and film clips of the Charlottesville Confederate monument removal protest, Trump MAGA rallies, and the January 6 coup attemp, I see oceans of white people.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com