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Title: Growing Up Cracker
Author: J.J. McAfee
Date: October 18, 2008
Language: en
Topics: white supremacy, Elections, United States of America, Bring the Ruckus
Source: Retrieved on March 14, 2019 from https://web.archive.org/web/20190314161028/http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/70
Notes: J.J. McAfee is a Pennsylvania native currently living in western Massachusetts. She is a member of Bring the Ruckus.

J.J. McAfee

Growing Up Cracker

When I first learned of the July 2008 brutal beating of Luis Ramirez in

Shenandoah, Pa., I felt nauseous. Absolutely sick to my stomach. Plenty

of stories in the news and distributed over listserves can and do make

me queasy, and mad as hell, but this one hit so close to home, I had to

pause for a few deep breaths.

For those who haven’t heard of the case, which has garnered national

media attention (including a People magazine spread on September 8),

here’s a quick summary: Undocumented Mexican worker walks down

residential street, gets jumped by four white high school football

heroes, is left unconscious and foaming at the mouth, dies two days

later. For a fuller report, see the Washington Post’s September 2 story,

which paints a pretty accurate picture of the region. Or just google

“Luis Ramirez Shenandoah,” but be forewarned: You’re going to encounter

a whole lot of vitriol.

Luis Ramirez was in the US “illegally” for six years before his death.

He was engaged to Crystal Dillman, a white woman born and raised in

“Shen’doh,” to use the local vernacular. He was the biological father of

two of her children, and she says he treated her other child like his

own. Dillman has no doubt that her fiancé’s death was racially

motivated, and she has been anything but quiet about it. “People in this

town are very racist toward Hispanic people. They think right away if

you’re Mexican, you’re illegal, and you’re no good,” she told an AP

reporter. A witness to Ramirez’ final fight recalled, “I heard a lot of

screaming. A female saying, ‘Stop beating him. Stop hitting him.’ They

said, ‘You fucking bitch. Tell your fucking Mexican friends if they

don’t get out of Shenandoah they’re going to be laying next to him.’”

My immediate reaction to hearing that Ramirez was murdered by four high

school football players drunk on malt liquor was this: They’ll get off.

Maybe they’ll get probation — maybe — but nothing worse. This is rural

Pennsylvania, after all: The good ol’ boys always win.

Sure enough, already a judge has reduced the teens’ charges from first

and second degree homicide to third-degree manslaughter. The boys’

attorneys, demonstrating they obviously know a thing or two about the

region, have opted to get them tried as adults, even though all are

under 18. This means they’ll have a jury trial — and, tell me, how are

you going to assemble an impartial jury within 100 miles of Shen’doh?

I stand by my prediction: the boys will go free.

How would I know? I grew up not in Shen’doh, but 30 miles away, in a

rundown, rough-and-tumble, working class town a smidge larger than

Shen’doh but no less white, where the common creed is “God, Country,

Football” — not always in that order. Turns out Luis Ramirez held a

second job there, picking fruit. As I said, close to home.

I can vividly recall the night two adolescent black men who were dating

my good friends (white girls like me) were literally chased out of town,

threatened by a pack of our testerone-charged high school classmates to

“Leave, or else.” Smartly, the “outsiders,” visiting from a nearby

university town, didn’t stick around to find out what the “or else” was.

Quite possibly they could have suffered the same fate Luis Ramirez did

20 years later. Their skin was darker than Luis’, but the message to

both was the same: Go back where you came from. Yes, those were

formative years.

Let’s get something straight: My hometown is not 100% lily white. Nor is

it a sundown town. A few black families are longtime residents, and as

far as I can tell, they get along fine. That is, if one defines “fine”

as complacently tolerating being called “Oreos” — black on the outside

but white on the inside — an epithet I heard in many hallways and locker

rooms. For whatever reason — and in this football-crazy town, the fact

that some of their youth have contributed to gridiron success can’t be

overlooked — these select families have been allowed to be part of the

fabric of the town. They have, for the majority of the townspeople,

“become white.” Or white enough, anyway.

Ethnic hatred is of course not new to the anthracite coal region.

According to Philip Jenkins, author of Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme

Right in Pennsylvania, eighty years ago, 57 of Pennsylvania’s 423 Ku

Klux Klan klaverns were located in eight anthracite counties centered on

Scranton (Joe Biden’s childhood stomping grounds), Wilkes-Barre,

Pottsville, and Hazleton. There were as many as 40,000 members in this

region alone, mostly Protestants whose ancestors were the first to

arrive — Scottish, English, Welsh and so on — trying to prevent “new

immigrant” Catholics like Irish, Poles, Slovaks, and Italians from

taking their jobs in the mines and elsewhere. Schuylkill County, where

Shen’doh is located, had 11 klaverns. A few years ago, I did some

geneological research and learned that my great-grandmother, a

working-class (read: poor) single mother whose husband died in a coal

mine, was in the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the KKK, which supported the

building of a public elementary school in 1925; the Klansman’s Creed,

“anti-foreigner” through and through, was printed in its entirety in the

school dedication program, along with the names and photos (sans hoods)

of the Knights of the KKK.

Fast-forward 80 years, and the region is still a hotbed of white

supremacy, in the streets and in the courts. In Hazleton, Pa., less than

20 miles from Shenandoah, Mayor Lou Barletta has gained a national

reputation as the “English-only mayor,” and according to the latest

polls, he appears to be well on his way to unseating longtime incumbent

Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski, who has not seen a serious challenge in

12 terms. In 2006, Barletta championed city-wide legislation that would

have punished businesses who hire documented immigrants and fined

landlords who rent to them. He has repeatedly asserted that undocumented

immigrants are responsible for an increase in local crime, despite

having no evidence to support his claims. The ordinances were set to go

into effect November 1, 2006 but were blocked first by a federal judge

issuing a restraining order, then by a landmark trial decision that

declared the laws unconstitutional. The ACLU, who argued the case with

co-counsel, applauded the decision; the City of Hazleton has vowed to

appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, exactly one week after Luis Ramirez’ brutal beating, Lou

Barletta was named “Mayor of the Year” by the Pennsylvania Mayors

Association.

On August 31, 2008, a group that calls itself Voice of the People USA

organized a rally in Shenandoah that attracted somewhere between 200 and

600 people, depending on the source; videos posted at the group’s

website and those of its despicable allies, Diggers Realm and Save

Shenandoah, show the latter number is probably more accurate.

Partway through the rally, in an admirably gutsy move, Crystal Dillman

showed up with a few friends and unfurled a Mexican flag, sparking a

shouting match in which she denounced the crowd as racist and asked

them, “Who’s going to farm your Christmas trees? Who’s going to pick

your fruit?” State troopers surrounded Dillman’s group and urged calm

from the crowd, as they chanted “Go home, Crystal. Go home, Crystal.” No

violence erupted — this time.

Eighty years have passed. The names have changed, but has anything else?

Consider this bit from the Washington Post story:

“These kids are not bad kids,” says Joe Sobinsky, a bus driver at the

high school. “They’re normal coal region kids. They got in a fight and

people got hurt.” Sobinsky tells the Latino kids on his bus not to speak

Spanish because non-Latinos think they’re talking about them. Once a

Latino sophomore told him, “You’re picking on me because I’m brown!”

Sobinsky pointed to the Polish Italian olive hue of his own skin and

said: “Before you got here I was the brownest. So you got two shades on

me — now get back in line!”

In other words, “You ain’t white yet, sonny.”

Another bold prediction

Here’s another prediction lots of folks in the liberal valley where I’ve

lived for 10 years but can’t quite bring myself to call “home” sure

don’t want to hear: John McCain will be our next president.

What am I, some kind of soothsayer, you ask? Hardly. I don’t need a

crystal ball to see through the fog that enshrouds Obama believers. It

may be a fog of hope, but it’s also a fog of denial. Call me a bitter

Pennsylvanian if you must, but the bitter truth remains: White supremacy

still rules the day in the USA, and that’s not going to change come

November 4, 2008.

Obama’s comments on the people of small towns in Pennsylvania have been

widely broadcast, though not always in context:

”You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot

of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years

and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton

administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive

administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna

regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get

bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t

like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way

to explain their frustrations.”

Well, he gets it and yet he doesn’t get it. What Obama doesn’t say and

cannot ever say — even if he does realize it — is that what these folks

are clinging to is not just their guns and their religion or their

“anti-immigrant sentiment,” but their whiteness. Despite everything —

the shuttered factories, the barricaded mining shafts, the kids getting

drunk on Mickey’s every weekend — they can be grateful for one thing:

They’re white. And you can bet they’re going to fight — with their fists

or their votes — to make sure that category still counts for something.

Bumblefuck, USA?

Perhaps what frustrates me most about liberals, and even many people on

the left, is their notion that places where rednecks live are backwoods

and backwards. Trust me, they are neither. Shenandoah is not an anomaly.

Neither is Jena, Louisiana, for that matter.

White supremacy is not a rural phenomenon that rears its head in some

podunk village off the beaten path. It’s smack in the middle of the

path. Sometimes it’s in your face (like the Minutemen), sometimes you

have to watch and listen more closely. From a conversation someone I

know overheard between two senior citizens (old white men) in a gym in

an affluent New Jersey suburb:

”I’m voting for McCain.”

“Why?”

“What other candidate is there?”

“What do you mean, what other candidate is there? What about Obama?”

“I don’t like what he has to say.”

“And you do like what McCain has to say?”

“Well, he’s, well, you know, he’s said some good things....”

“Why not vote for Obama?”

“I just don’t like him. I don’t trust him.”

“Why don’t you just admit it: you don’t want a nigger for president.”

Although I have not heard this conversation myself, I am certain it is

taking place in hushed (or not so hushed) tones across the United

States, in gyms, kitchens, bars, stadiums. Many Obama supporters have

been duped into believing that race no longer matters, that Obama has

transcended his status as an “African American candidate.” Nonsense.

Wake up Obamanation: Your candidate is black, and race does still

matter.

I’ll admit I could be wrong in my election prediction. It’s possible

this essay might come back to bite me in the ass in November. If so,

I’ll quit the betting life and brace for some haranguing by my comrades.

But, really, does it matter? Elections are the real bridge to nowhere:

Regardless of who wins, our capitalist economy will still be in the

toilet, shit will still be shit, and most of it will still be slung at

poor people of color. (See “After the Election, Then What?”--written

four years ago but still relevant.)

Nevertheless, in recent months, I have been paying more attention than

usual to election-year shenanigans. Sarah Palin is one reason. Being a

hockey mom myself, one who snuggles with pit bulls at that, I’ve been

gobbling up Palin stories against my better judgment (and at the expense

of my more worthwhile ‘to read’ list). My partner laughs at me. But

heck, she’s like my northern cousin, bad jokes and all! (Wanna know the

real difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull wakes up

later.) The fact that Palin’s a woman is not going to matter to the

misogynist men who vote Republican, for they know that if McCain were to

kick the bucket while President, yes, Palin would inherit his Oval

Office chair, but you can bet she’d have a team of (mostly white) men

behind her to make decisions. A black man in power, though? That’s

another story.

Yes, Pennsylvania matters. But not because it’s a swing state.

Pennsylvania matters in the same way every United State (sic) matters.

Whether I’m in Alaska or Alabama or true blue Massachusetts, there’s one

thing I’m betting on: White supremacy is the glue holding this fragile

society together. Like Crystal Dillman, we need to take a stand and

struggle against it. Smash it to bits, and see what emerges. I predict

it’ll be a world worth fighting for.