The white women who flipped: the price of changing your conservative views

[Bosa]

“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

[crockett]

sharia law same as Christians..

[OneHungLo]

Originally Posted by crockett

sharia law same as Christians..

haha why do you say this dumb shit? You live in a Christian majority country.

Do Christians kill apostates?
Do Christians kill homosexuals?
Do Christians stone women for getting raped?
Do Christians stone women for adultery?
Do Christians cut off hands of thieves?
Do Christians condone slavery?

You're an idiot.

[Bosa]

Originally Posted by OneHungLo

haha why do you say this dumb shit? You live in a Christian majority country.

Do Christians kill apostates?
Do Christians kill homosexuals?
Do Christians stone women for getting raped?
Do Christians stone women for adultery?
Do Christians cut off hands of thieves?
Do Christians condone slavery?

You're an idiot.

Did Christians condone slavery? Yes

How Christian Slaveholders Used the Bible to Justify Slavery

During the period of American slavery, how did slaveholders manage to balance their religious beliefs with the cruel facts of the “peculiar institution“? As shown by the following passages — adapted from Noel Rae’s new book The Great Stain, which uses firsthand accounts to tell the story of slavery in America — for some of them that rationalization was right there in the Bible.

Out of the more than three quarters of a million words in the Bible, Christian slaveholders—and, if asked, most slaveholders would have defined themselves as Christian—had two favorites texts, one from the beginning of the Old Testament and the other from the end of the New Testament. In the words of the King James Bible, which was the version then current, these were, first, Genesis IX, 18–27:

Bishop Stephen Elliott, of Georgia, also knew how to look on the bright side. Critics of slavery should “consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”

Many southern Christians felt that slavery, in one Baptist minister’s words, “stands as an institution of God.” Here are some common arguments made by Christians at the time:

Biblical Reasons
• Abraham, the “father of faith,” and all the patriarchs held slaves without God’s disapproval (Gen. 21:9–10).

• Canaan, Ham’s son, was made a slave to his brothers (Gen. 9:24–27).

• The Ten Commandments mention slavery twice, showing God’s implicit acceptance of it (Ex. 20:10, 17).

• Slavery was widespread throughout the Roman world, and yet Jesus never spoke against it.

• The apostle Paul specifically commanded slaves to obey their masters (Eph. 6:5–8).

• Paul returned a runaway slave, Philemon, to his master (Philem. 12).

Charitable and Evangelistic Reasons
• Slavery removes people from a culture that “worshipped the devil, practiced witchcraft, and sorcery” and other evils.

• Slavery brings heathens to a Christian land where they can hear the gospel. Christian masters provide religious instruction for their slaves.

• Under slavery, people are treated with kindness, as many northern visitors can attest.

• It is in slaveholders’ own interest to treat their slaves well.

• Slaves are treated more benevolently than are workers in oppressive northern factories.

Social Reasons
• Just as women are called to play a subordinate role (Eph. 5:22; 1 Tim. 2:11–15), so slaves are stationed by God in their place.

• Slavery is God’s means of protecting and providing for an inferior race (suffering the “curse of Ham” in Gen. 9:25 or even the punishment of Cain in Gen. 4:12).

[Rochard]

My eighteen year old daughter is friends with a gay, skinny little black kid. I thought it was a bit odd at first, but didn't think too much of it. The more time I spent with him the more I discovered he was a lot of fun..... and it turns out our family has a lot in common with his family, including having family down in SoCal a few blocks from where we usually visit. He had never had Arby's and wants to try it, I mentioned how I used to love Arbys..... So I bought him a shirt that sais "Straight our of Arby's".

You have to open up your mind a little bit. People that are different than you have flavor and character.