Deborah Scroggins was covering refugee issues in Atlanta when I was a refugee placement worker there, providing resources against (in retrospect, maybe for) the gangster, prostitution and physical violence issues we were importing. If I recall correctly, she interviewed me in the early 1990′s when I was a spokesperson for refugee women’s issues and also when our odd community (conservative evangelicals and leftists) was coming to terms with precisely what we had wrought — I remember picking up from the airport Afghan “families” with 9 “sons” between the ages of 10 and 20, no daughters, one old toothless woman — and also rushing women to the hospital because refugee women’s husbands had adapted to electric stoves by using them for punishment. A hand on the grill: why the hell did I learn the smell of burning flesh in Clarkston, Georgia?
And why did the estimable New York Times send scores of reporters there to root out vague prejudice among the decent, old, white Baptist church ladies who ran the ESL classes, classes where, after lecturing, I walked away amazed by the commitment and equanimity of these “small-minded southerners” towards the cluttered, disruptive, universal humanity arriving in droves on their doorsteps? I’m still amazed at how those perjurious NYT assholes accused decent people so easily of hatred — then jetted back to their exclusive zip codes, where nobody from Clarkston could possibly have afforded to live. I don’t use slurs lightly in print, but I can’t edit my feelings about the grotesque mistreatment of the good, decent, extraordinarily generous people of Clarkston, Georgia.
If Ms. Scroggins is the person I remember — and I’m pretty sure she was, Deborah — she was willing to excuse any excess committed by brown men against any woman. Yawn. She’s no feminist: she’s just another white girl trapped in a cycle of self-destructive, elite self-loathing that can only be fed by attacking other women. It’s the sick default of pathological liberal feminism.
It’s also not inconsequentially why you can smell burning flesh in Clarkston, Georgia, and it’s why shops advertising burkas are scattered throughout the county now, and it’s why we actually had to write an anti-clitorodectomy bill there over a decade ago. I passed a burka shop outside Clarkston recently, amazed at a sign advertising full facial covering of women where African-American civil rights organizers used to go home to their non-veiled, tough, PhD. educated wives at night. Why nobody associates such regression with the reign of the masked Klan in the twenties in nearby Stone Mountain eludes me.
Sickening. I continue to be sickened by my involvement in its provenance. But, Dr. Chesler, I ask you to reconsider your support for Judith Clark. She is a manifestation of such identity-based hatred. It would only be justice for her to die in prison.
