A racist runs through it
By Nate Schweber
SEPTEMBER 23, 2016
When the neo-Nazi and his acolyte came to my high school, I dimly thought racism was just a history or geography lesson. I was born and raised in Missoula, Montana, a friendly college town cut through by great trout rivers and surrounded by mountainous national forests protected more than a century ago by President Theodore Roosevelt. I was also a white teen in the middle of one of the whitest regions in the country. To introduce my class to ideas outside our pine-fresh bubble, our teacher invited as guest speakers the late Richard Butler, who founded the Aryan Nations in Northern Idaho, and his onetime associate John Trochmann, co-founder of the Militia of Montana.
The men spoke on different days and they hammered on the threat public lands posed to white society. Our nation's more than 600 million acres of national parks, forests, grasslands, wildlife refuges, and Native American reservations held in trust by the federal government were, we heard, tools of the United Nations to keep whites from having a sanctuary… or something. We also heard that the swastika had been unfairly maligned because to some people it signifies a blessing. What surprised me most though, was the bile that welled up in my guts at our sex ed lesson. People with different skin tones having babies, we heard, was like different species of animals being mated. The example I remember is the old trope about donkeys and horses, but to check my memory after 20 years I reached out to others in the class and heard it might have been pintail and mallard ducks. (Another detail I just learned: The father of my only Jewish classmate went out and got a gun for protection because of these men.)
What seemed an unnatural pairing – attacks on public lands and racism – went on display for all the country to see in the summer of 2014 when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy went on a racist rant in front of a New York Times reporter who visited his ranch and cantaloupe farm. Bundy had summoned a militia to brandish arms against employees of the Bureau of Land Management, who were trying to round up his illegal range cattle. The reporter had expected to hear Bundy’s reasons for wanting the federal government to sell off or transfer to state control some of those 600 million open acres of public land. Bundy unexpectedly reminisced about his impressions on driving past public housing in Las Vegas. Out flew a barrage of bigotry about how blacks today might be better off still locked in chains and picking cotton ...
http://narrative.ly/a-racist-runs-through-it/
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