I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never had the urge to do something incredibly stupid when I’m drunk. Specifically, I’ve never had the urge to do something incredibly stupid that goes against my core values and beliefs when I’m drunk.
In fact, I’m quite the docile inebriated college student when I drink, sitting quietly on a sofa, maybe with a book propped open on my lap or some tune-age blaring in the background. I’ve never, say, had the urge to set something on fire.
I’ve never gone “cow tipping.”
I’ve never hung a noose around the statue of a respected member of the Civil Rights movement.
Rewind the tape to 2014, and you will recall a blip on the national radar regarding an interesting piece of news about a few college kids who “allegedly” hung a noose around the University of Mississippi’s own James Meredith statue.
For those of you not in the know, James Meredith was the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi (I purposefully leave out the colloquially acceptable Ole Miss because of the negative connotations attached to it).
These three alleged students withdrew from school and two of them now face charges, the third now identified. I’m not trying to put anyone on blast here, but this needs to be said. Who raised these kids?
Some Southern context is needed.
I’ve lived exclusively in the South my entire life, specifically in Mississippi.
We get a bad rap, we do.
What makes it worse, however, is when someone comes and does such a reprehensible thing to such a venerated piece of history.
I could talk about how it’s wrong.
I could talk about the repercussions.
What I want to talk about is this hate and ignorance that is bred into the younger generations even to this day. Now, granted, these three alleged students are from Georgia, but it’s still the South, y’all.
I’m a white, lower class boy who has to check his privilege every day, but I can assure you my mama never once said anything negative about a black person, or a person of any color for that reason.
I’ve always been taught to treat everyone equally, but what is awful is that this kind of bigotry and hate still exists.
I worked in a factory for almost a year, and I heard a floor full of primarily white men bemoan Affirmative Action, and even heard grown men use racially charged slurs to refer to other people inside and outside of the workplace.
If men not much older than me are still making these kinds of racial slurs, and are having children, what are those children learning from these men? What is the younger generation being taught? If we as a society are still allowing bigots to raise children with those core ‘values,’ bigotry is never going to go away.
So, I propose a new way of thinking.
Shut every bigot down. Every one of them.
Gone is the excuse that “they’re too old to learn new tricks.” Gone is the mode of thinking “Oh, it’s just how they were raised.”
There is no need for hate anymore. There never was. There never will be. Call out your local bigot, even if it’s a family member. They need to check their privilege. Ignorance breeds hate, and there are a LOT of ignorant people we encounter every single day. So the real issue here isn’t the fact that three students who hail from Georgia hung a noose around a statue.
The real issue is that somewhere along the line these students learned this hate from someone else. It wasn’t born in them. It was bred into them. Let’s make a change, y’all.
Jerry McCalpin is a senior Theatre major from Burnsville, Mississippi.
