‘You need to think like a white man.’
When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, we were assured that “racism is over.” Bert Rein, the lawyer that led the legal challenge to the VRA, said flatly:
There is an old disease, and that disease is cured. That problem is solved.
Rein is a solid conservative and former Nixon administration official, so he would certainly know. Did you pop the champagne and break out the bratwurst when Rein announced that a problem that has plagued this country since before its inception was magically ended by the stroke of a judicial pen?
Well, it seems a few people just never got the memo. Two African-American workers at the Atkinson Cotton Warehouse in Memphis have filed a lawsuit alleging a truly vicious series of racist words and actions leveled against them by a former supervisor. The supervisor is not named in the media reports. Litigants Antonion Harris and Marrio Mangrum tell stories of shocking and vicious racially-motivated abuse from the supervisor. He called them “monkeys,” they say, and even forbid them to use the same water fountain and microwave that white workers used. Mangrum tells reporters:
He would be like, ‘You need to think like a white man.’
And Harris says:
He pulled his pants down in front of us and told us to kiss his white tail.
After months of being subjected to the supervisor’s abuse, Harris recorded one interaction on his cell phone. Harris began recording when he attempted to drink from a water fountain in the warehouse office, and was stopped by the supervisor. The conversation went as follows:
Supervisor: Hey!
Harris: What?
Supervisor: I need to put a sign here that says ‘white people only.’ … Back then, nobody thought anything about it. Now everybody is made to where to think it’s bad.
The conversation continued, with the supervisor actually saying that Harris would be lynched if he drank from the fountain:
Harris: Put your sign on the wall then, because I am feeling to drink it. What would they do when they catch me drinking your water?
Supervisor: That’s when we hang you.
Harris also recorded the supervisor objecting to him using the microwave.
Harris: I am going to use the microwave.
Supervisor: Hell no!
Harris: Why can’t I use the microwave, man?
Supervisor: Because you are not white.
Harris: For real?
Supervisor: As a white man, we don`t even let Larry use it.
Mangrum explains that Larry “has been there 10 to 20 years and he is a black guy also.”
Harris says,
I think about this every day, every day of my life.
The two workers have filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which is working with the firm’s owner to settle the dispute.
Harris says he has worked at other cotton gins without being subjected to such virulent racism.
As for the cotton gin, the owner refuses to comment except to say that he outsources the management at the Atkinson warehouse. A worker at the warehouse says that the supervisor still works there, and is currently on vacation.
The Free Republic, that right-wing bastion of civil liberties and racial diversity (not), noted the incident in a post. The comments on the post are, as always, telling:
((Shrug))
Maybe he only wanted homo employees to use the facilities.
You can take democrats out of the klan, but you cant take the klan out of the democrats.
Amazing that, not so long ago, an isolated incident at a Tennessee cotton gin wouldn’t have even made the local paper, let alone the UPI wire!
Everyone has the God-given right, protected by the Constitution, to personal opinions and discrimination. Threats are a states issue.
Let’s see. In recent weeks, we’ve reported on someone lynching President Obama in effigy, an NBA owner spouting his own virulently racist views, a white man beating his daughter for dancing with a black man, a white judge verbally and physically abusing a black teenager, a white man threatening to kill a mixed-race child because of his heritage, a police commissioner forced to resign after labeling Obama with a racial slur, Obama being blamed for the nation’s racism … and that’s just in the past few weeks.
Hey, Bert Rain: you think racism is a solved problem now? Or could it be that you, and those like you, like the fact that our society continues to battle with racism, ignorance and hatred every single moment of every single day?
Published writer since 2001, focusing on politics, history, Web development, and other topics. First book is coming soon.
