"Our Blacks"

Je ne résiste pas à vous proposer la lecture de cet extrait d'un article de Lucian K. Truscott IV, trouvé sur le site Alternet, intitulé "We're in a New Civil War" :

What I’d like you to do is this: try to imagine for a moment living in a small town in the deep South — a town like, say, Gadsden, Alabama — surrounded by piney woods and sandy soil, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else’s business. A lot of industry already moved offshore, to countries where they can pay workers even less than the right-to-work pittance they paid in Gadsden. Left behind are strip malls, Pizza Huts, Krispy Kremes, muffler shops, tire retailers, Dairy Queens, women selling Mary Kay cosmetics to each other.

Over there on Lewis Road you’ll find an old red barn set up as a horse shoeing business, with a long-dead rusted flat-bed truck up on blocks, and across the one lane black-top road, a 50-by-12 trailer home with peeling paint and an above-ground pool right next door to a ranch-style house with aluminum siding that has three cars parked on the gravel drive out front. Drive a little further, and you’ll find another ranch-style house with aluminum siding, and another, and another, and a truly amazing number of pick-up trucks parked in driveways in various states of disassembly or repair. And churches — lots and lots of churches — New Faith Community Church, and Faith Baptist Church, and Full Gospel Tabernacle, and James Memorial Baptist Church, just across the street from the Dollar General, and the Living Truth Christian Center, which is not far from the St. Paul Overcoming Church of God, which is just down Glenwood Avenue from Paden Baptist Church.

The small Southern town we’re imagining — say, a place like Gadsden, Alabama — has a population that is 34 percent black and 62 percent white, so it’s easy to imagine yourself as a citizen of either race. Now what I’d like you to do is imagine that you are one of the black citizens, and living in Gadsden, Alabama you hear this phrase over and over and over: our blacks. Let me say it again: our blacks. You also hear our negroes, and our ni**ers, but because Gadsden is under somewhat of a national spotlight and people are endeavoring to be seen as, ahem, inclusive, let’s have you imagine hearing from the mouths of your fellow citizens who are white is that you are one of our blacks.

Now what I’d like you to do is stop imagining, because that’s what you’ll actually hear in Gadsden, Alabama and towns like it all over the deep South.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-roy-moore-might-win-alabama?akid=16431.2664112.Khd1pd&rd=1&src=newsletter1085886&t=32