“That’s The Way Racists Is Made”
I was in high school, but my life was anything but the normal “chick in high school’s” life: every day, one or the other of my parents had to drive me, forty-five minutes in each direction, to Southern Pines to receive UVB light therapy for my psoriasis. They even opened the office on the weekends, so that I could get the treatments every day. On this particular day, we were running late, because it was Daddy’s turn to take me, and he had gotten held up at work. We were sitting at the stoplight near our house, which sat at a very busy crossroads, one section of which was headed by the local Burger King. The light turned green, and Daddy made to pull out into the intersection, just as some jackass on our left-hand side–the road that crossed our straight-ahead–decided to run their red light, shooting out at a very high speed right in front of us. If my Daddy’s reflexes had been even a little bit slower, we would’ve died in a fiery car crash. Instead, Daddy slammed on brakes, extending his right arm across my chest to make sure I didn’t jolt forward, and screamed at the jackass (who just kept going): “That’s the way angels is made!” That phrase subsequently became “what you shout” when someone nearby committed a dangerous traffic violation, or committed any other act of stupidity that could lead to someone’s death. But it was coined that day, at the stoplight in Rockingham, North Carolina, near Burger King. That phrase has stuck with me through life, and I’ve found myself mumbling it under my breath many times in the thirty years since.
My relationship with my Father wasn’t always roses and puppies and unicorns. For a lot of years, as it so happens, that couldn’t have been further from the truth–for about two decades, we barely spoke to each other. In fact, I often told people that my Daddy was dead, because the man I had known growing up actually seemed to be. Those periods in our relationship were not solely my Daddy’s fault, though, and I feel that’s something the world should know that I know. No, those periods in our life were largely engineered by whichever woman he was married to at the time, and there were two, between the period when I attended and graduated college, and 2015, when he and I finally regained our relationship. Three years ago, in August 2015, I saw my Daddy for the last time; I hugged my Daddy for the last time. And it was on that day that he and I decided nobody was gonna get in the way of our relationship ever again; it would be me and him til the wheels fell off, and I can honestly say: it was.
For the past three years, I’ve experienced a lot of sometimes-three-hour-long phone conversations with my Daddy. During those long talks, we would cover everything from politics to religion; talk about “old times”, back when the family lived up here in Boston, and he would tell me more and more about his own life, as a young man, long before I was even thought about. Daddy was in high school when the schools integrated, and at the same time, they moved him South, to live in North Carolina, because of him getting in constant fights here in Massachusetts (kinda like when Bruce Lee’s family moved him from Hong Kong to America), and also because my Grandmother was really worried he was going to get sucked into local organized crime (read: mafia). In fact, he actually dated Al Capone’s niece at one time! (Only one time; when he went into the house and saw basically a shrine to Good Ole Uncle Al in the corner, that was pretty much the first and last date! Although that was obviously years after the fact–Capone died in 1947–and most of Capone’s involvement was in New York and Chicago, Daddy knew what that little “shrine” meant: that family was mafia-sympathetic. That was pretty much all he needed to know.) Growing up in Boston, my Daddy had spent a lot of time at the doughnut/coffee shop where my Grandmother worked in the North End, and he had been approached on multiple occasions to run “packages” for Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, who was at that time only an underboss in the world of the Massachusetts mafia. So, the struggle (and my Grandmother’s fears) were very real, and Daddy got “shipped South”.
It wasn’t a picnic being one of the few Sicilians (the only ones in the area were our family) in a small town Southern high school undergoing integration. Because of the limited understanding of Sicilian history by the locals, Daddy was often called a “nigger”, and frequently found himself being treated in the same way as the “black kids”. That developed a deep understanding in my Daddy, though: “It don’t matter what color you are, we all put our pants on one leg at the time; ain’t nobody beneath you, unless they do something that proves they are”, he used to tell me. And what were the criteria for someone having done something that made them beneath me? Well, one of those was treating people with prejudice: hating someone purely because of the color of their skin, the church they went to (or didn’t), who a person chose to love, or because a person was poorer (financially) than them. Living in a close-minded-world, called Wop, Guinea, Daygo, and the n-word by somebody somewhere at least once a day every day of his life, my Daddy learned to abhor racism, class-ism, able-ism, and anti-LBTQ+ mentality precisely because he was a victim of racist and class-ist attitudes on a daily basis. He infused me with a “hatred for hatred” pretty much from the time I could talk. And it was a good thing he did: when I started school, I was likewise frequently called Wop, Guinea, Daygo, and the n-word. Yes, that happens in the South even as young as the age of five. And it happened my whole life, right up until I was homebound from school (courtesy of disabling psoriasis) at the age of sixteen.
My Daddy passed over the Veil on June 20, 2018. I found out about it second-hand: one last dig from the woman Daddy called “wife”, who had tried so often over the years to keep us apart. Obviously, given my track record with contacting the dead, she didn’t win. I’ve had more time with my Daddy over the course of the last three months than I’ve had in the past twenty-four years! And part of that time with him often consists of those same sorts of conversations about politics and religion that we had during those last three years of his life.
Given my current involvement with the Heathen community, through the books published by my Press, Iaconagraphy, and also through having recently (finally) become Fulltrua of Hela, those conversations with my Daddy often turn to the ugly face of white supremacy that is currently tainting the Heathen community. Only, it’s not just racism that’s at stake or at issue, here in the world of 21st Century Heathenry, it’s also sentiments about the effectiveness of ethnic cleansing; sentiments of hatred towards Muslims and immigrants; notions that the LGBTQ+ community is largely made up of pedophiles and that they all should be run off the nearest cliff, ala lemmings. Having been raised in the South the way I was raised in the South, naturally, all of this is very upsetting to me. Realizing that many of these sentiments are furthered by attitudes like “I’d rather be a wolf of Odin than a lamb of God”, and “my pantheon is bigger, badder, and tougher” than your pantheon really doesn’t make things better; it makes things worse. Because we don’t need an “either/or” dichotomy within this faith or any other; we need “both/and”, if we’re going to get through the utter cluster fuck that the world is right now. So, coming from a shamanic base, of course the first thing everyone tells you to do when you have an issue, or when something is weighing on you, is “go to your Ancestors”. The Ancestor I picked is a relatively new one to the game–my Daddy–but he was wise in life, and death definitely didn’t dim that wisdom. After I laid it all out for him, here’s what Daddy had to say:
“You put -ism on the end of anything, and it usually turns that thing ugly. I always thought with the word race, for example: a race is also a thing you can run; a thing you can win. So if you’re a different race, that just means you’re in this life, and you’re running it–same race as all the rest of us–and you’re here with the potential to win. But you put -ism on the end of race, and that makes racism, and that means somebody somewhere is sayin’ ‘you ain’t worthy to run this race’. People don’t get to judge that; only God or the Gods or whoever you wanna call ’em can judge that! You put -ism into religion, and you wind up with things like monothe-ism and panthe-ism and Catholic-ism and Protestant-ism and whatever else. That’s what most people call ‘organized religion’. But what that really is is a bunch of humans trying to play God and say: ‘all y’all who are part of this -ism, y’all are the only ones doing things the right way, so y’all are the only ones who get to run this race.’ Fundamentalism (there’s another one!) leads to religious racism. What you’re tellin’ me is all these people are using all these big words like archetypes and cognates and whatever to make their monothe-ism or panthe-ism or whatever different and better-than, compared to all the other branches of monothe-ism and panthe-ism and whatever. But I look at that and we’re back at that stoplight at Burger King, and instead of angels, it’s racists: ‘that’s the way racists is made!’ They did that in the Church, way back when, too, before the Civil War: tried to use God’s words in the Bible, to say ‘hey, slavery is okay; our ancestors did it; look, Paul even tells slaves how they’re supposed to behave if they’re actin’ right, so, clearly, God’s okay with slavery.’ This is the same thing: ‘hey, my God’s bigger than your God, and my God’s different than your God, and because my God’s bigger and better and tougher and cooler and whatever-the-hell-else, then that means I’m better than you; I’m whiter than you; I’m straighter than you; whatever.’ But God is God, and we’re just people. And people don’t fully get to ever understand God. Hell, I’m dead, and I still don’t confess to fully understand God. To try to say that somebody knows it all about God is a lack of humility that I’m pretty sure won’t end well for that person! You can’t cram God into a human box, either: that’s limiting God. And that’s that same lack of humility. Whether you wanna say one God or a whole bunch of Gods: it’s all the same thing, and it all comes from and goes back to the same place. And human beings don’t ever get to fully understand that, or define that, or whatever. And humans sure as shit don’t need to be going around placing limitations on God, or living a life of ‘I’m better than you’ that they try to back up with God-talk. Because, like I said: ‘that’s the way racists is made!’ Just ’cause you’re replacing the word ‘race” with ‘monothe-‘ or ‘polythe-‘ or Catholic or Protestant or Heathen or Pagan or whatever, that don’t make what it is any less of what it is: fundamentalism is fundamentalism, and racism is racism, and hate is hate, plain and simple.”
Daddy also asked that I look up fundamentalism in my “fancy online dictionary”, so, as directed, here is that definition, courtesy of Merriam and Webster and Wikipedia:
fundamentalism: a form of religion that upholds the belief in strict, literal interpretation of scripture, an unwavering attachment to irreducible beliefs (that is, beliefs that cannot be simplified, nor can they be diminished), and usually maintains a strong sense of “ingroup” versus “outgroup” distinctions, leading to an emphasis on purity and the purifying of a religion and its members. All of the above usually results in a general rejection of diversity of opinion within that religion.
In other words, when a religion places more emphasis on scripture than practice, experience, or belief, and forms unwavering rules (“this is the way things are because it says that here in this book and nothing can change that.”), and then maintains an attitude of “we’re this” versus “you’re that”, with the “we’re this” effectively being the “good guys”, then that religion has become fundamentalist. When a religion begins to place ultimate emphasis on maintaining purity of that religion and its members (“This is Heathen/Pagan/Catholic/Protestant/etc., but that isn’t, so don’t you dare do that!”), then a religion has become fundamentalist. When all of the above have led a religion down a path where that religion no longer fosters diversity of opinion (“well, if you believe that, then you aren’t Heathen/Pagan/Catholic/Protestant/etc.), then that religion has become fundamentalist. Hopefully, given this definition, it becomes self-apparent how religious fundamentalism easily leads to first religious racism, and then out-and-out, overall attitudes of supremacy.
And there you have it, straight from the mouth of my Daddy. Now, I realize he is my Daddy, and not yours. But this Southern girl recognizes the deep wisdom of his words, and I hope that all of you will, too.
Note: I am not a deejay; I do not take requests. The work I do is for the Dead, not for the living. What do I mean by that? No, I will not “call” your beloved, long lost, dear old Aunt Agatha up on the “psychic telephone” and give her a message for you, nor relay a message from her to you. That would likely be more damaging than you can imagine for both you and beloved, long lost, dear old Aunt Agatha. This conversation with my Daddy was not a channeled conversation: I went “out there”, and we had a chat. I patently do not channel family members: that’s just creepy! I will not be relaying messages from the living back to my Daddy, either, apart from a general “hi” or “we love you”. As in life, if you have something uber-important to tell your Beloved Dead–including my Daddy–perhaps you should take the time and effort to attempt to hold that conversation yourself, rather than attempting to go through a third party, like me. Third party communications generally tend to end up like a group of kindergarteners playing telephone! That doesn’t change, just because one of the players involved is deceased! Take the time; leave an offering, and then, most important of all listen: not with your ears, but with your heart. Love lets us speak in languages we never knew we knew, or could understand. Always remember that. You don’t need a gal like me; you just need love.
