Mississippi Burning- A message gets buried by racist assholes

It may be 2024 in America, but it still looks like 1964 in Mississippi

I’ll freely admit to not following the student protests on college campuses nationwide. I’ve had a few other things I’ve been keeping an eye on, and I haven’t had the bandwidth to follow the issues behind the madness. There have even been our very own contretemps here in Portland (shocking, I know) at Portland State University, where protestors occupied (and trashed) PSU’s library. Damage there is so bad that the library will remain closed until fall semester.

There are two big reasons I haven’t exercised my brain cells over these protests:

1. These protests will have precisely ZERO effect on what Israel is doing in Gaza, and

2. in most of the protests, as is true here in Portland, most campus protestors aren’t students.

For whatever reasons, protests like these draw a class of people who love to raise Hell and break shit. The cause is secondary to the opportunity to burn and destroy. There are a lot of folks with anger management issues and too much time on their hands.

Nice work if you can get it, yeah?

I don’t know the exact numbers at PSU, but police arrested something like 41 people at PSU, of which four were students. That makes it difficult to sort out the seriousness of the student protests. No doubt there were those present who were passionate about the war in Gaza and wanted to speak their mind, and they have every right to do so. I don’t think those were the ones putting up barricades, trashing the PSU library, or doing damage at other campuses around the country.

And then you have the University of Mississippi, which treated us to a trip in the Wayback Machine:

OXFORD, Miss.—A styrofoam cup full of ice water flew out of the hands of a counter protester and across the partly cloudy sky toward a group of pro-Palestine protesters at the University of Mississippi on Thursday, marking the beginning of a tense hour on the Quad.

Some among a mostly white, mostly male group of counter protesters engaged in racist, sexist displays and hurled epithets. One man danced like a simian while making monkey-like sounds in the direction of a Black woman who supported Palestine while his compatriots chanted, “Lock her up!”

The counter protesters outnumbered the more diverse group of roughly three dozen pro-Palestine protesters by about 10 to 1 on the Oxford, Miss., campus at the height of the event. 

As the pro-Palestine group called for the U.S. to stop funding Israel’s war on Gaza, the counter-group sang the national anthem and shouted chants at them, such as “F–k Joe Biden,” “Who’s your daddy?,” “Take a shower” and “Shave your legs.”

Multiple law-enforcement agencies were on the ground, keeping their backs against the protective barricades surrounding the pro-Palestine protesters.

Stay KKKlassy, eh?

Man, these kids were raised well. Then again, this is Mississippi we’re talking about.

As with many protests around the country, the “gathering” in Oxford devolved into a ragefest that had little to do with the matter at hand. It’s what happens when outside agitators decide that involving themselves in campus protests is a great idea.

In Oxford, MS, though, it could’ve been 1964 all over again.

And the Magnolia State’s leaders were all over it.

Despite videos showing many of the counter protesters’ racist and misogynistic antics, the counter protests drew praise from several of the state’s mostly white male leaders—including Gov. Tate Reeves (whose own college career included participation in a fraternity known for racist antics), Secretary of State Michael Watson and State Auditor Shad White. 

“Warms my heart. I love Mississippi!” Reeves wrote on Thursday, sharing a video of the counter protesters.

That’s all well and good, but given the virulently racist history of the University of Mississippi, wiser counsel might have suggested they tone down their praise a wee bit.

The University of Mississippi has a long, sordid past when it comes to race. After the University of Mississippi admitted its first Black student, James Meredith, in 1962, deadly, racist riots erupted on campus culminating in President John F. Kennedy calling in the National Guard to quell the furor. Federal Marshals escorted Meredith to his classes as white students hurled racist epithets, even exploding M-80s at him.

The day before the riot at UM, the state’s segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, had given a rousing speech to a crowd of 41,000 people waving Confederate flags at a UM game against Kentucky. “I love Mississippi. I love her people, our customs. I love and I respect our heritage,” the segregationist Dixiecrat declared, drawing a chorus of rebel yells in reply.

In 1983, months after the Ku Klux Klan marched on campus, Black students huddled in a Black fraternity house to hide while about 1,000 white students singing “Dixie” and screaming the n-word roamed the campus—angry over rumors that Black students intended to burn copies of the yearbook that prominently featured photos of the klansmen.

Race continues to play a large role at the University of Mississippi today. In the 2020 UM Emails series, the Mississippi Free Press reported extensively on how university officials frequently catered to the whims and demands of racist donors behind the scenes—including one who compared Black women to apes and shared photos mocking Black students as “hookers” with a former dean.

Racism isn’t a theoretical construct in Mississippi (nor is it at either state university). The subject may not be discussed as openly as it was during the Civil Rights Era, but it’s still very much part of the ethos of the Magnolia State. What happened last week in Oxford was an overt expression of what’s typically kept under wraps.

The Mississippi Legislature has targeted efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion education, though efforts to kill DEI education have thus far failed. Like Floriduh, though, good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriots will eventually get their way and make edumication White-centric.

Whatever the protests on the University of Mississippi campus were about, then, they were only nominally about the war in Gaza. The counter-protesters, some of whom may have been pro-Israel, seemed as much about hassling the pro-Palestinian group as they were about being racist White assholes. If you look at the above picture, what do you see? I’m guessing they were more pro-asshole than anything.

Quelle surprise; we see young White males, including one holding a Trump flag. Gee, I wonder where they learned that asshole behavior and hatred? Those kids didn’t suddenly become racists once they alighted on UM’s Oxford campus. No, they learned that racist hatred at home. They were taught that being good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriots was their birthright. It put them at the top of the food chain and others were “less than.”

They came to accept that their skin color, religion, gender, and sexuality meant that they had every right to expect that they’d have the first shot at the best of everything in life. They learned that anyone who told them differently posed a threat to Their Way of Life ©.

As such, they had every right to insult, denigrate, and cheapen those who were different. They internalized the belief that those who were “less than” must be constantly reminded of their place and kept there because, without those reminders, they might begin to think differently. They might start to think they were equals and thus had access to the same rights and privileges as good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriots.

That could not be allowed to happen. Under ANY circumstances.

Equality might begin to feel like oppression to those who’ve grown accustomed to inhabiting the top of the food chain their entire life.

There’s little doubt but that Mississippi is, has been, and remains Ground Zero for virulent racism at and below the surface. Last week’s protest served as an illustration of that and, sadly, demonstrated that racism is alive and well in the Magnolia State’s younger generation, who have no connection to the Civil Rights Era except through their parents and grandparents.

They’ll tell two people, and they’ll tell two people, and they’ll two people…and so on….

In a statement Friday evening on the pro-Palestine protests and counter protests, UM Chancellor Glenn Boyce said he and other university leaders were “aware that some statements made were offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable, including actions that conveyed hostility and racist overtones.” He said the university had opened a conduct investigation into one student and were “working to determine whether more cases are warranted,” but could not name the student currently under investigation due to privacy laws.

Boyce acknowledged UM’s racist past.

“While we are a modern university with a vibrant community of more than 25,000 people, it is important to acknowledge our challenging history, and incidents like this can set us back,” he said. “It is one reason we do not take this lightly and cannot let unacceptable behavior of a few speak for our institution or define us. We are a community of scholars committed to creating an academic experience that respects the dignity of each individual. … To be clear, people who say horrible things to people because of who they are will not find shelter or comfort on this campus.”

If nothing else, last week’s protests on the UM campus made clear to the nation what Mississippians have long known but seldom acknowledge—that racism remains alive and well in Mississippi.

In early 2023, Mississippi Republicans sought to put in place a separate law enforcement infrastructure for Whites in Jackson. The proposed new system would overrule the majority-Black city council and put large portions of the city under the control of state officials, all of whom are White.

WHAT racism??

As reported by Mississippi Today, the legislation would allow the state's white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, its white attorney general, and the white state public safety commissioner to appoint new judges, new prosecutors, new public defenders and new police officers to oversee a new district in the city encompassing all of the city's majority-white neighborhoods, effectively creating a separate justice system for whites in what is statistically considered the Blackest city in America.

And it would do so without any of those officials receiving a single vote of support from any resident from Jackson, 80 percent of whom are Black.

"It reminds me of apartheid," Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told the website Tuesday.

Newsweek has contacted Lumumba for comment, as well as all three of the bill's principal sponsors, who claimed on the floor of the Mississippi Legislature that the foremost aim of the bill was "public safety" amid concerns of crime rates in Jackson.

This is happening six decades after the Civil Rights era. It may be 2024 in America, but in many respects it’s still 1964 in Mississippi. There may not be lynchings or cross-burnings, but racism has become more subtle and insidious. Worse, generations are still learning to judge others based on the color of their skin. Until that happens, there can be little hope of real, substantial, and lasting change in Mississippi.

So, yes, while the protests at the University of Mississippi may have ostensibly been about the actions of the Israeli military in the prosecution of its war in Gaza, that quickly degraded into a secondary concern.

While young Master Staples is deservedly getting his 15 minutes of fame for all the wrong reasons, I sincerely hope he’ll recognize his error and understand that judging people based on the color of their skin is a fool’s errand. Whatever else he may have going for him, being a good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriot is apropos of precisely nothing.

Because of the actions of a group of ignorant knuckle draggers, the purpose of the protests was quickly cast aside. Not that the demonstrations would’ve accomplished anything of value. I seriously doubt Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu would change anything based on a protest in Oxford, MS. Nor is a major university likely to divest itself of stock related to companies doing business in or with Israel.

From a raising awareness standpoint, though, it would’ve helped to let people know what Israel is doing in Gaza—and it IS unconscionable. As strongly pro-Israel as I am, I’m appalled by the tactics and butchery of its military.

All of that has been papered over by the Sturm und Drang created the racist idiocy of people like J.P. Staples. It seems Mississippi is still burning.

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