Tim Barrus: New York Times
I live in a small town in Appalachia. Hate is ordinary. It has a silence, too. A silence that says everything. A silence of indifference. The silence of ordinary people. My neighbors have always felt threatened. They listen intently to the hate in the media. The corporations – all of them in New York – that mine this hate for profit, can be called out, but there is nothing more American than profit. Hate makes money.
Come to Appalachia, see it, taste it, walk down its streets, and if you still think the confederacy is dead, you are not thinking. You are not listening. You are seeing what you want to see. African-Americans have their side of town, shacks, barely livable, wood piles for cooking and for heat, this is not a place of crime. It is a place of endemic survival.
White people have their side of town. Houses that are one step, inches really, from being the same shacks on the other side of town. Confederate statues, confederate flags, confederate flags on pickup trucks. High school boys who ride through the other side of town, flags in the wind, trolling for victims. Everyone scrambles and locks the door.
These are the high school boys who will become your leaders, your lawyers, your doctors, your representatives, your law enforcement, and your FBI agents. They will pull the bells and levers of existence. In fact, they already do. They will go to the big colleges on the other side of the state just like they always have. Hatred is institutionalized.