Sure. Sure, We Believe You. I Mean, Look At The Evidence.
Jacksonville, Florida, ain’t exactly the sprawling center of racial harmony, but when someone at the Army Corp of Engineers placed a Confederate flag on the desk of an African American man just one week after nine people were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, things didn’t seem, you know, proper.
Susan Thompson, 58 years old, a worker at the office, who is white, denied to federal investigators that she had anything to do with it, even though she had a contentious relationship with the victim.
Prosecutors say that during interviews over the Jacksonville incident, Thompson lied to investigators twice.
Thompson later resigned and has admitted to placing the flag. She denied it was racially motivated.
Nah, nah, it wasn’t racially motivated. Not at all. She had no idea what the confederate flag is. She thought it meant Have a Nice Day!
#TFP
Bless her heart.
1It’s the thought that counts.
2How revolting.
3This woman needs some caring wise friends and/or family to do an intervention and bring her face to face with reality and humanity.
4Nothing is ever about race. Not even slavery was about race. The fact that all the slaves were black was just a big coincidence.
5This sort of overt bullying in the workplaces propels my inner ball of hate to almost lightspeed. Please? Can’t we jettison those Confederate States for 20 or 50 years until natural consequences reduces the population to about 1 or 2??
6Growing up in various Navy stations around the southeast, from North Carolina to Texas to Jacksonville to Key West, I saw this balled-up hatred first-hand.
It was illuminating, seeing the same citizen oppression by cultural propaganda I’m seeing sixty years later from Trump.
7Unfortunately, she was probably surrounded by family and friends who fostered this bigotry. “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
8Yes, Maryelle. I’ve used that line myself. But y’know, when is it time to grow up and question the things you were taught? Their refusal to that is my concern.
9Bigots can’t see racism.
10I moved from CA to SC in the early ’60’s; talk about culture shock. I’d never seen such raw hatred for people, just because of their skin color.
Told some kids in gym class one day that while things in CA weren’t perfect, we still didn’t have the meanness I’d seen in SC; black/white water faucets, don’t do business with black people because white people might not do business with you after that. Eat/drink/everything done separately, although certainly not equal.
11LynnN: Sometimes like fish can’t see water.
12Once I had some real hope that when so many northerners, especially of a humanitarian strain, migrated south with their companies that there would be a full out turnaround in race relations. That was my fine wine of hope; it got so frustrated it shrunk back to a seed. Daughter and her family are still desperate to get out of Aladamnbama. They may have to wait until the kids are grown and flown and then retire back North.
13@maggie
We had a family of friends in which Dad got a sorely wanted promotion that forced them deep behind the cotton curtain to Huntsville, Al Abama. While they put on a good face, my little bride caught some subtle signs, in particular the Mom, a drama teacher of some note in Texas, home-schooling her girls in Al Abama. Then not so subtle when mom and girls returned to DFW just after Memorial Day and didn’t return to A-d-b until after Labor Day. Eventually Dad resigned his big job and returned the familyto Texas. Bitter. Very Bitter. And the adults are fairly conservative. I’ve heard the girls use “fascist” as their code word for Huntsville.
14She’ll be on Fake Noize before you know it claiming she is the victim and Fake Noize will proclaim to the depths of hell she is right. Wingnuts will campaign on this issue,raise a bunch of money and then throw her under the bus,as she is of no further value to them.
15Susan Thompson clearly left that flag because it matched the rep tie the man wore that day. He should return the favor. By her way of thinking, it should be OK for him to leave a horse’s head in her bed to match the other end of the horse that is she.
16Liet’s see- denied placing the flag, lied to investigators, admitted placing the flag, denied it was racial.
And in what’s left of her heart she knows she did absolutely nothing wrong.
It’s so sad to me that actions like these have become so commonplace including several people in my family and a few lifelong friends. There are times when I question the need to keep up relations with them. I can only hope that one day they will wake up from their decades long nightmare of fear and hate to become sentient beings once more.
17Micr, guess where my daughter’s family lives! Yup. You guessed it! And she has a number of friends home schooling because the schools are actually behind the ones they just left up north. Mention that to any of the indigenous population and they will back way off with mouths agape and finally yell something about Communist???
History channel (which my daughter cannot get in her area) had a great show on recently about how there was already a north south split during the American Revolution. The South was heavily pro-Brit and thought very badly of the North. 80 years after the end of that war another one began with the same split and hostility. It was that cotton curtain thing. The south was totally hooked on that white fluffy stuff growing in the fields. Too bad there wasn’t a 12 step program to wean them off of it, but Britain was one of their biggest costumers.
18Now that’s passive-agressive!
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