I'm not proud of this.

But if I want to deal with a difficult issue honestly, I have to tell the truth.

Back in 1972, while I was still in college, and after a series of personal crises had left me rudderless, I was befriended by a group of young people who were active in evangelical Christian circles; two of whom had attended Bob Jones University.  (Yes, THAT Bob Jones.  The one that prohibited inter-racial dating as recently as this decade.)

In my previous post, "How Religion Ruined Politics and Politics Ruined Religion," I wrote about that time in my life, so I'm not going to go into any more detail here, but suffice it to say that I was very lonely, and those friendships met a need at the time.

That spring, I was deeply worried about an old and dear friend with whom I'd had a romantic relationship, off and on, for years (at the time, it was off), because he was a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam.  When I found out that he had, indeed, returned safely from his tour, had rotated out of the Army, and was at home before leaving for a new life in West Texas, I traveled to my hometown to visit him.

I can still remember how he looked then, how broad and strong his shoulders were from months spent humping a rucksack through the jungle, how sexy in his cowboy hat.  He was 6'4" tall and I was a foot shorter.  I was visiting with his mom in the living room when he drove up into the driveway in the new, gold, '72 El Camino he'd bought, and I ran out and threw my arms around his neck.  He hoisted me up in one arm and carried me effortlessly into the house.

We visited a while with his mom, and then he had some things to bring in from the truck, so I followed him out, and he handed me a bag to carry.

We were happy and laughing, and I grinned up at him and said, "Who was yo niggah last year?"

That was a cute little saying I'd picked up from some of my new friends.  I'm ashamed to admit that I did not think anything of it at the time.

This, from a young woman who had black friends and who had worked and written about civil rights while in college.  Who'd been outraged at incidents of racism her whole life.

It would be easy to blame my new friends, but they hadn't made the remark.  I had. 

Thoughtlessly, stupidly.

My friend, Kent, stopped what he was doing, stood up to his full height, and in a stern voice I'm sure he normally reserved for clueless privates, he said, "That's not very funny.  It's a terrible thing to say."

And when he turned away, I stood there, dumbstruck at the truth of his words, my own humiliation, and inner self-rage that I had fallen into such a careless, thoughtless remark so easily, when I thought I knew myself better than that.

Later, I learned that in the month before Kent had departed Vietnam for home, they'd pulled him out of the jungle and sent him to a rear area, where one of his tasks had been to quell civil rights unrest among the men.  He did so with the help of a black sergeant who was as big as he was, a man for whom the young lieutenant had felt nothing but respect, admiration, and affection.

I never made that remark--or any other like it--again.

Eventually, I found some new friends.

Two years later, I married Kent, and have remained married to him for a very happy 35 years.

I'm recalling that cheek-burning incident now in order to use myself as a prime example of what I call "hidden hate speech."

Most of us who have any kind of functioning brain cells know how dangerous hate speech can be, whether spewed over the airwaves, blasted onto the Web, or circulated in nasty e-mails.  Especially following the recent presidential campaign and inauguragion of the country's first black president, we've all recoiled in horror at some of the things we've seen and heard.

Most of us who love our president, supported him, and voted for him, worry a great deal about his personal safety.

Newsworthy tragedies like the recent murder of an abortion doctor only reinforce our anxiety about rising hate speech and hate crimes in this country.

Like one Supreme Court justice's definition of pornography, we all know hate speech when we hear it.

But sometimes, we don't know it when we speak it ourselves.

Or worse, we know it when we hear it, but we say nothing.

Understand that I'm not talking about just African Americans here.  Hate speech and hate crimes spread like bloodstains and affect all sorts of minorities--from Latinos who catch the brunt of illegal alien-hate, to gays who are the victims of homophobia, to Muslim-Americans, who must endure the suspicions of a population conditioned by the previous administration to think of all of them as terrorists.

Ever since Barack Obama gained prominence with his eloquence and powerful speaking ability, his opponents and enemies have dismissed some of his most stirring speeches as "just words."

And yet, ask most any American what he or she thinks of, say, the Gettysburg Address, and see them grow misty-eyed.

Ask if they've heard the words, "I have a dream."

Ask if they're familiar with, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Ask if they've ever studied the words, "All we have to fear, is fear itself."

And ask how they felt when the leader of the free world, when he was questioned about the growing strength of an insurgency in Iraq, famously replied, "Bring it on."

Words matter.

It wasn't until I moved to West Texas and began bringing up my two children, who are 31 and 29 now, that I realized how much words--and the actions behind them--matter.  Most of the prejudice I encountered was directed toward the Mexican-American population because, I suspect, they were a larger minority out here than the African-Americans.

Still, racism seemed to be all around us.  In jokes, for instance.

Or, careless remarks (some not-so-careless) like the one I'd made years ealier.  

When my kids started school, I really had to swim against the current to encourage them to make inter-racial friendships, but I made it clear that any and all of their friends were welcome in our home at any time.  The first time my son, who was six, had a sleepover with a friend away from home, it was with a Hispanic family.

But it wasn't until they got into high school that I began to feel the sting that hidden hate speech and subtle racism can bring.  By that time, many of my son's best friends, for instance, were Hispanic.

And it started to cost US, his parents, friendships with some (I emphasize: SOME) of our white friends.

We didn't realize it at first.  It took a little time.  But gradually, we began to figure it out.

Not that we gave a great big flying damn.

During that time, I had a weekly newspaper column in the local paper called, "Country Life," about bringing up kids in the country, but I wrote about many things.  One time I wrote about gays, about how, basically, they are people too, how they're not pedophiles, and so on, and I talked about my married friends, Steve and Scott.

The next day, I got a two-sentence letter in the snail-mail from my publisher, firing me. 

He said, "Thank you for your promptness," on account of how I'd never missed a deadline in 16 years.  And that, as they say, was that.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it's not easy, in a social setting, to do what my then-future-husband did to me:  Stand up straight and say, in effect, That's a terrible thing to say.

Psychologists say that, from an evolutionary standpoint, just about the greatest fear that men and women have is not the fear of death.

It is the fear of being shunned by society.

This is because, when primitive mankind traveled together from cave to cave in tribes, the worst punishment that could be bestowed upon a tribal member was to be ostracized--shunned--from the tribe, because to be kicked out of the cave was, most likely, to die.

This is one primeval reason that so many people fear public speaking.  The fear of making a fool of one's self, or of being judged as somehow unfit for the tribe, is a deep fear.

In this time of the Internet and polarization, many of us have sort of drifted into one sort of chosen tribe or another, based on our common mutual interests and points of view.

I happen to hang out with a kind of tribe who wouldn't dream of telling a racist joke or making a stupid remark like the one I made back in college in my bonehead days.

So, what happens is, we get lulled into a certain complacency, and by that I mean, we don't tend to encounter prejudice on an overt basis so much in our daily lives, partly because it has been legislated out of the workplace (as one example) and partly because we don't see it in our friends.

But prejudice--and the malevolence behind it--has only gone underground, so to speak.  Into the closet.  It's hidden, but it's there, and if we had any doubts about that (which I never did), we sure saw it during the recent campaign, and here again, with the nomination battle over Judge Sotomayor who, you may remember, is "not too smart," even though she was valedictorian of her high school senior class, won the Pyne Prize for academic excellence at Princeton, and edited the Yale Law Review.

(I don't recall anyone ever saying that John Roberts wasn't too smart, and his credentials were less impressive than hers are now.)

When tragedies like Dr. Tiller's murder happen, we recoil in collective horror, but we should not be surprised, because the truth is that the number of hate groups out there, and the places where hate speech is easily disseminated to an eager audience, has gone up FIFTY PERCENT since 2000.

So...what can we do about it?  How can we fight back against hate speech?  How can we, figuratively if not literally, stand up strong and say, "That's a terrible thing to say"?

For many years now, I have been a supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I can think of no better place to start rethinking hate speech.

Once, a commenter on one of my posts singled out the SPLC as a "radical left" group.

Oh for heaven's sake.  That's hogwash.  Utter nonsense.

Begun back in the '70's as a civil rights law firm by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, the SPLC branched out in the '80's by taking on the foundational hate-group of all time, the KKK.  When years of criminal prosecutions had resulted in few--if any--verdicts and/or sentences against KKK members who'd participated in assassinations, lynchings, beatings, kidnappings, and murders, the SPLC began to bring lawsuits against individuals and groups in CIVIL court.  The resulting cash settlements have broken the back of many of the largest, most powerful hate-groups in existence in this country, by simply bankrupting them.

Consequently, they began a serious effort to monitor and catalogue hate groups and hate crimes nation-wide, and their data base grew to be so impressive that the FBI began to consult them, which it continues to do so, to this day.

Their quarterly Intelligence Report puts together a comprehensive study of many of those crimes, the crime trends, successful prosecutions, and progress made in combating hate crimes, and is subscribed to by hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the country.  I get mine in the mail, but you can read it online anytime.

To my way of thinking, nothing the SPLC has done in its distinguished history can touch the work they've done through schools all over the country, with their free Teaching Tolerance classroom materials.  Through grants, multi-media kits, handbooks, and their monthly magazine, Teaching Tolerance provides useful classroom materials that enable teachers to enhance their students' understanding of the cultural history and accomplishments of many minority groups and to increase their sensitivity to forms of bigotry such as homophobia.

Located next to the SPLC center in Montgomery, Alabama (which has been bombed once, by the way, and Morris Dees deals with daily threats on his life), is the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Vietnam memorial artist Maya Lin, and contains the names of those who fought and died for civil rights.  Water flows over the names 24 hours a day, and the site is open to all for quiet contemplation.

Also located at the SPLC headquarters is a 20-by-40 foot Wall of Tolerance, in which the names of thousands of supporters who have pledged to take a stand against hate, injustice, and intolerance and to work for justice, equality, and human rights are available on an Interactive display.  If you should ever get a chance to visit that wall in Montgomery, do me a favor and check it out.  You'll find my name among the number, and I may not get the chance in this lifetime to see it for myself.

In the meantime, there is another way you can stand strong against hate.  You can go to the SPLC "Stand Strong Against Hate" interactive map, which designates pinpoints in two colors.  The red dots indicate hate groups located in this country.

The green dots and squares represent men and women like you and me who have pledged to stand up whenever we see or hear acts of hate in our area.  When I entered my name and zip code for my own little green dot, up popped my home state of Texas, which, according to the site, hosts 66 hate groups.

And lots and lots of green. 

Another thing you can do is visit the SPLC homepage, (link provided above) and if you've got a few bucks to spare, I strongly encourage you to make a donation, because right now, there are more hate groups and hate crimes in this country than at any other time, and our president received more threats against his life in the days following his inauguration than any other president, according to the Secret Service.

If you haven't got any money to donate, that's fine.  All you have to do is speak out.  Words are free.

Words matter in this world.  Violent acts of hatred do not need to be confronted with further violent acts of hatred.

Violent words--no matter how well-meaning or couched in a joke--do not need to be confronted with violence, either.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple, "That's a terrible thing to say."