What I Did Over Winter Vacation: Learned Bigotry is Alive and Well

What I Did Over Winter Vacation: Learned Bigotry is Alive and Well

Paydon Miller

Undergraduate/ Political Science and Print Journalism

Story time. Two of my favorite cousins own a bar and grill in northern Wisconsin. This year they decided they would take on the responsibility of throwing the Christmas festivities for one side of my family, which is no small task. I showed up around 8 p.m. and did the Christmas thing for a while, mingling and laughing with people I hadn’t seen in months.

Because of my involvement in the Obama and the Jeff Smith campaigns, I tend to get asked a lot of political questions at these types of gatherings. The occasional heated debate is inevitable. This doesn’t bother me; I enjoy political debates more than just about anything.

At about 10 p.m., I was approached by a guy I didn’t recognize (I would find out later he was a friend of one of my cousins). He was big, loud, and probably had tipped back a few more than he needed to. “You’re the Obama kid?” he asked me. I told him that yes, I was. He asked me a rather involved question about tax policy, and I answered as well as I could in such a loud environment. He listened more intently to my answer than I was anticipating. He even asked a follow-up question - and an intelligent one at that.

What came next is the reason I write this article.

“I voted for Obama,” he explained to me. “And, see, I hate niggers, but…”

At first I was certain I had heard him incorrectly; his wife, who was standing next to him at the time, didn’t flinch. But then I saw the disgust on my cousin’s face and I knew my ears hadn’t fooled me. I walked away from him mid-sentence, mostly because I knew that pursuing that line of conversation would result in me getting my puny ass stomped by a drunken redneck, but that comment stuck with me over the next few days. I turned it over in my head again and again, trying to rationalize such thought processes.

Call me naïve, but I had thought that such bigotry had died long ago. How can someone toss around racially motivated hate speech in the same year that our first African American president was elected, and the first Vietnamese American congressman was put into office? In a time of such positive social change, in what mindset is throwing out “I hate niggers,” in a conversation an acceptable action for a grown man (a veteran, at that) to take?

It’s easy for us, as college students, to forget about people like this. I know I sure had. Every study has shown that we, as a generation, are by far more accepting of people different from ourselves, be it because of race, sexual orientation or physical or mental handicap, than any past generation. Last year, when the infamous Westboro Baptist Church came to Stout to protest a gay student’s funeral, they were driven out of town in hours by the students. Nothing has made me more proud to be a college student than that display of unity to defend a person’s dignity in death, regardless of sexual orientation. The greatest compliment I can give to our school is that they make it very easy to forget that racism still exists. But it does.

So when our generation runs this country, maybe we’ll see social justice become a practice rather than an idea. But for now, we, as one of the most powerful groups in the country, need to stop the bigoted, like the aforementioned bar patron, from splitting the country into races once more. Xenophobia can only be fought with one thing: celebration of diversity.

Celebrate the fact that the country elected our first African American president this year.

Celebrate Ahn “Joseph” Cao, the new congressman in the 2nd District of Louisiana.

Celebrate Keith Ellison from Minnesota, who was both the first Muslim congressman elected, as well as the first congressman to be sworn in on the Koran. Celebrate people like Tammy Baldwin and Harvey Milk, who faced criticism every day as openly gay political figures.

No matter what side of the aisle you sit on, I daresay none of you will try to tell me that accepting varying walks of life is a negative step to take - at least not openly. Whether you consider yourself Democrat, Republican, Independent or Communist, we must come together on one issue and one issue alone.

Outrage. Outrage needs to be the unifying theme of our generation. Outrage at the pass of legislation that legalizes bigotry and says that homosexuals are second-rate citizens. Outrage that someone can still say “I hate niggers,” in a public place and have people around them not even flinch. Outrage that one of the biggest knocks against President (!) Obama during his campaign was that he was a “Muslim,” like the religion itself is inherently evil.

I’ll say this once more: In a city like Eau Claire, it’s very easy to forget that blind hate still exists. Bigotry still runs deep in the underside of our society. The best way to combat hate is to celebrate even the smallest of victories

As we begin to take control of this country, I have no doubt that we will return those rights to the people from whom we have taken them. Until then, voice your outrage by all means possible. Write letters. Get on your proverbial soapbox and tell people when they’re wrong. Actively pursue intelligent debate.

Get mad.