“I love you,” Chera Sherman’s mother told her before driving away in her Jeep Cherokee, leaving her daughter, then 19, bawling fat tears in front of her boyfriend’s home in Laurel, Mississippi.
It was 1994, and Sherman had made the life-altering mistake of falling in love with Jerry Breland, a lanky, black 19-year-old she’d met through a friend back when she worked at Kmart.
Her mother had finally told her stepfather about their six-month relationship earlier that day after a local cop pulled Breland over while he was driving his girlfriend’s yellow Sunbird.
When her stepfather heard she was violating his code against race-mixing, he drove to her job to tell her she had to move out.
“White men aren’t going to want you,” her father told her.
They allowed her to collect only what she could carry. The teenager couldn’t take her bedding or her jewelry – she even had to leave her car. “I love ya, but I just can’t have this,” her stepfather said as she grabbed random items.
In the car, the teen was hysterical the whole way; she was crazy about her boyfriend, but she didn’t want to be an orphan. She loved her family, too. “You made this decision,” her mother said, adding that she didn’t agree with her husband but had no control over it: he was the man of the house. And with that, she drove off.
Racism was the required way of life in Sherman’s mostly segregated community. When she was four, she had called a black man the N-word in public because that’s what she believed black people were called. The man was mortified, and her family members had laughed.
Inside, her boyfriend’s father told her she could sleep on the couch until the couple could get an apartment. They found one, but the owner kicked them out after a month when he realized Breland was black. They then landed a rental house where the landlord only cared about the color green.
Although she’d made good grades and planned to enroll at a community college that fall, higher education never happened for Sherman due to the obligations the couple took on to be together. He now works offshore on an oil rig; she takes care of their two boys.
‘Gaslighting is an art form perfected by conservatives’
Still happily married after 25 years, Sherman-Breland now believes many women pay the price – through abuse, rejection or public humiliation – for rejecting America’s rat’s nest of conservatism and racism that has exploded into full relief in Trump’s America.
“I can’t tell you the countless number of times younger Caucasian girls who are going through the same exact thing have reached out to me for advice,” she says now.
The south isn’t alone in its paternalism and sexism, but it is still a high art form here. “It is absolutely taught,” Sherman-Breland says. “You understand as a young girl that your place is behind your man, not in front or beside him. You cannot have your own opinions. That’s the most prevalent way they keep you in check.”
Sherman-Breland gradually went against her family’s broader conservative political beliefs as she became concerned about the future of her biracial sons, but it took hearing people she knew calling President Obama “the devil”, and Donald Trump’s open bigotry and birtherism, to electrify her. She now calls herself a proud liberal.
Most conservative wedge issues trace back to racism and sexism, she argues, adding that those poison beliefs take many shapes: abortion and immigration might make white people the minority; affirmative action gives the supposedly inferior an equal shot at jobs and education; public assistance benefits “freeloaders” of color.
White women continue to embrace such prevalent mores. “We’re helping you be a better woman. You’ll be stronger as a submissive Christian,” she says, mocking local white conservatives.
Sherman-Breland used to be anti-abortion herself, and while she doubts conservative men would actually overturn Roe v Wade – abortion is useful to them if they get the wrong women pregnant – she says they instead use it to get religious women to vote against their best interests. Abortion, she says, is what keeps many women she knows from quietly pulling a more progressive voting lever, especially after hearing Trump or Roy Moore next door in Alabama seem to justify sexual assault.
“Gaslighting is an art form perfected by conservatives in the south,” she says, wrinkling her nose.
The hypocrisy kills her. College wasn’t an option for her parents, either, who worked at garment factories. “We relied on social programs to eat,” she says, her smirk dripping with irony. “Not that they were lazy.”
No free pass for white women
White supremacy and all its destructive deep-seated beliefs are, like other forms of barbarism, usually ascribed to men. But historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae warns that it is a mistake to give white women a pass while ignoring their role in America’s systemic racism.
“What’s wrong with white women?” – a common question after the 2016 election – is due to an amnesia, according to McRae, a history professor at Western Carolina University. McRae’s 2018 book, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, illuminates powerful grassroots alliances of women across the country that worked to keep segregation alive in the 20th century.
“Segregation’s constant gardeners,” as McRae calls those women, distributed myth-filled textbooks and created student essay contests justifying white supremacy in public schools. They also enforced “racial integrity laws” used to kick someone who had “non-white” blood out of school, or have their marriage license refused.
Many of them were educated – some suffragists and newspaperwomen or even union advocates – and they purposefully helped create the twisted race politics that Sherman-Breland describes.
As the civil rights movement gained power, southern segregationists knew they were going to lose, McRae says, and they joined forces with conservatives nationally who coded their own racism. “Outside of the south, they needed to minimize overt racial language and instead talk about ‘constitutional government’,” McRae says. “Campaigning against social welfare and the safety net served their segregation purposes, too.”
Segregationist women used black-inferiority myths to bolster explosive anti-busing protests in Boston in the 1970s, McRae adds. “It’s not to say that all conservatives are white supremacists, but that white supremacists and segregationist politics animated and shaped the new right,” McRae says. “Folks advocating various forms of segregation were all over the nation.”
And they still are. White women, she says, are still often the loudest voices in these battles to keep children of color and/or poverty from “tainting” schools.
‘I wasn’t taught real history’
Lynne Schneider, 49, grew up in Lawrence county, Mississippi. Schneider’s early views were shaped in the Southern Baptist church, but saying the N-word was frowned upon by then, and her working-class parents didn’t allow it.
Lynne Schneider is changing her conservative beliefs as a teacher in a majority-black school.
But in her public school, which was about two-thirds white, black kids sat on their own side of the cafeteria, and white children like Schneider went to a “private” pool that didn’t allow African Americans.
Young Schneider believed her elders when they said everything was equal between races, or that the south fought the civil war for honorable reasons and not over slavery. “I wasn’t exactly an examining person. I wasn’t taught real history,” she says, adding that her textbooks were filled with romantic myths about the Old South.
That wasn’t by accident, historian McRae says. Starting in the early 20th century, a well-funded group of women descended from Confederate soldiers, were desperate to rewrite the reasons why their fathers and grandfathers fought in the civil war. Daughters of the Confederacy leaders worked diligently to ensure that textbooks pushed “happy slave” lies and pride in European colonialism. They even worked with new teachers’ unions to pass on revisionist books to black public schools.
As an adult, Schneider emulated women around her, voting Republican when she was 18. She married a conservative man and became a teacher. By the time she came to Murrah high school in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2001, the formerly all-white school was majority-black. Today at 95% black, it is, astonishingly, the whitest public school in the capital city.
There she met an English teacher, a white woman, who challenged her to think deeper on issues such as abortion and gay rights. Later, her black students helped change her “small government” conservative beliefs which, she realized, keep schools underfunded and subject to constant attacks.
The students also pushed back when she messed up.
One day, Schneider told a class to “stop acting like BeBe kids,” a term used in the black community to reference misbehaving kids.
“You’re calling us ratchet ghetto kids,” they charged.
Schneider apologized for hurting them. “I still make mistakes,” she told them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ervative-views