Dedicated to the Game

I listened to your statement regarding the voter I.D. lawsuit today with a great sense of nostalgia. You see, I grew up in the South. I know the code. I was a soft-spoken, clean-cut kid and so people let me in on it without thinking twice. You might say racists educated me.
I was learning when they said things about what you should reasonably expect of someone, about what was only fair, and how certain people just were.
I was learning when the guy on our work crew vetoed a job applicant because, “I don’t want to ride around in the truck with one of them, the way they smell.”
When our church’s choir director turned to my father and said, “Isn’t that just like a nigger?”, after my friend in the heavyweight division got pinned and lost the tournament: another lesson.
I learned that some people just weren’t like us white folks. Some people didn’t deserve the same consideration. My instructors taught me to look down on people based on affiliations, manners of speech and origins. I got it, but not like they thought I would. You see, my teachers succeeded; I just came to feel that way about them.
The thing is, I wasn’t raised to bite my tongue like the black kids with whom I went to school and worked. By the time I had to do it to get by, the thing had already grown nerves. It galled me, and I guess I took it personally.
So, don’t blame me when I say this, blame my teachers – your ideological predecessors. When I hear some pig-fucking, redneck, piece of shit start talking Reasonable Racism – the code – I just get blind mad. I hate. So piss off. And if you decide not to piss off, as my teachers would say, “Don’t come ’round here, boy.”