David Billings

“Despite the current reality that racism continues to permeate the national consciousness and its structural arrangement, we must keep striving for the elusive goal of racial equity. There is no other choice. Either we challenge and transform these current white-dominated institutions so our nation can become one in which everyone’s humanity is recognized and affirmed, or racism will destroy us.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“My classmates stood and cheered when President Kennedy’s assassination was announced over the school’s intercom. I was in the eleventh grade in Helena, Arkansas in 1963. Even then, the cheers seemed rehearsed. How could teenagers express such rank emotion from something so vile and tragic? Was this something they had heard at home —“someone should shoot the son-of-a-bitch”? Just the year before, we had cheered the President for standing up to the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. The crisis was the threatening prospect of Soviet nuclear missiles ninety miles from the US shoreline. Kennedy had backed down the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Who knows what really happened? Now, we welcomed his brain being splintered by a rifle bullet next to his wife. A lone gunman did it. The Kennedys were for “civil rights.” This is the reason we cheered. Anyone“for civil rights” should have his head blown off. No one expressly said it, but I knew it. There were only two things for which we cheered so raucously back then: either a victory by the Arkansas Razorbacks (or, in my case, the Ole Miss Rebels) in a football game, or the defeat — in this case the murder — of a suspected civil rights leader. No international intrigue like missiles in a communist Cuba would have done it. Civil Rights. That was the reason. Later, we would say the same when John Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was killed. The Kennedys were for civil rights. That’s what got them killed.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life