missizzy

Friday evening we had a young black man come to our door. He said he was some sort of repairman, offered to do any work we wanted with a couple other guys. Hardly the first such door to door guy we've gotten. One guy even got my mom to let him do yardwork. This man wasn't as successful; mom politely refused and sent him on his way.
Then the next day, she woke up to a bunch of emails on the neighborhood listserv talking all about how they'd seen a "suspicious looking man" going around from house to house, with a bunch of them saying they'd called the police and even going so far as to congratulate each other for doing so! No mention of his being black; they were that far into denial about themselves. Mom rightfully called them out on their racist behavior and pointed out that they could've gotten that poor guy killed. The replies she got were nasty. They couldn't stand being called racist, apparently. Never mind that they endangered a man's life; that's a cold hard fact that apparently had no impact on them. She's unsubscribed from the listserv now.
We knew already, deep down. There's a reason Virginia's voters might hand the state right back to the Republicans in two weeks, even though we could end up being just like Texas or Florida, and contrary what the McAuliffe campaign is trying to claim in all its emails, it isn't really because of rich donors buying the state. It's because even our blue areas suddenly start prioritizing their racism again the minute we haven't had the right wing wrecking things for a while. And I'm starting to fear it'll destroy us all before we could hope to fix the problem.