Salon’s 10 most popular life stories of 2023: Satanic panics, getting naked with strangers and more

As a Native Son of Alabama, I would like to pull back the veil that surrounds the Black experience and provide insight into why the event that has been dubbed the Alabama Sweet Tea Party is my own personal flashpoint in Alabama history.
 

For context, it was not until I entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., coming from Birmingham, Alabama, that I first became aware of the misconceptions, and ultimately the stereotypes, about me from being born in a city known for dog bites and dynamite blasts, for killing four little girls and critically wounding another on Sunday morning in a house of worship, a day of dedicated peace and spirituality. Even at Howard, that great mecca of higher learning, there was always a formulaic assumption about Black Southerners: that we were countrified hicks, docile, unaware of the social constructs that bind us to a way of living, incapable of resistance — our drawl, the way we said mane and gull instead of man and girl, made us different, a sorta sideshow, an oddity within the fabric of Blackness. Read the essay by Randall Horton.