Author's Note: I don't usually include these, for a variety of reasons, but for this one isntance, I feel it is necessary: everyone portrayed in this chapter is either canon, or based off of real people who I've really met. In particular, Santee and Congaree, the two villains from down South, are a composite of several people I have met, and the only thing I have made up about them was that I made them female-every person like them that I've ever met was male, after all. I will say no more until the end, where I have included a more detailed explanation, but I wanted you to be aware of this fact: I did not make those two up, nor are they exaggerations of anybody I've met or talked to. If anything, I've toned them down, because I can't write the reality convincingly, and, frankly, it really kind of creeps me out.

P.S.: the reactions the characters have to them in the story are about accurate, too. Which is...kind of depressing, really.

Kaiser:

As the leader of the Empire Eighty-Eight, the largest and arguably most powerful of Brockton Bay's gangs (and potentially one of the largest and most powerful gangs in all of New England), and the CEO of Medhall, one of, if not the largest and most powerful of the city's major corporations, it wasn't often that Max Anders found himself feeling totally lost. Generally, if it was important enough for him to worry about, he had experts on call to explain the relevant details to him, and more experts to summarize those explanations to the point where, even if he knew nothing at all about the subject, he could still grasp at least the most important details, and make a semi-informed decision as to what to do going forward.

Generally, it was only family that really had the ability to truly throw him off his game, these days. And even that...well, Kayden actually agreeing to rejoin the Empire, even if she would not come back home, had been something of a surprise, but at least it was a happy surprise, and not totally out of left field. He'd thought she wouldn't accept anything more than a loose association, true—he was still a criminal after all, and she'd been trying to remake herself as a hero—but she'd agreed to come on as a lieutenant in the Empire, solely because her own efforts needed access to the Empire's intelligence network. Access, it need not be said, that Max was happy to provide. If Purity was intent on providing a kinder, friendlier face to the Empire...well, whatever his father might have thought, Max wasn't stupid, and he knew full well the importance of good public relations. A task which was especially difficult for a white supremacist organization such as the Empire Eighty-Eight, it need not be said. He didn't have any intention of involving her with the criminal end of the Empire again, either. Max's father might have been content to simply let the Empire dominate Brockton Bay, after all, but Max was not his father. And for all that Kaiser might not have been as savage as Allfather, Max liked to think that was more because his vision stretched farther, not because he was simply weaker, despite what his sister had once thought.

No, by now, very little outside of family surprised Max, whether he was currently being Max Anders, or the villain Kaiser.

Today, Krieg had managed it.

And Krieg hadn't just surprised his boss. He'd done it so totally, so completely, that Max was still struggling to recover, more than a minute after the initial shock. But...it wasn't working. No matter what Max did, he just...couldn't get his feet under him far enough to figure out what the hell was happening. If it hadn't been for the fact that his costume involved having a mask that covered his entire face, he was quite sure that his underlings would have seen his mouth gaping open like an idiot as he struggled to get his mind around what Krieg had just told him.

"I'm sorry," he finally said to the two beautiful young woman standing before him. "I seem to be missing a few...a few key details, I think. Why, exactly, did you want to join the Empire, again?"

The two-who appeared to be twins, if he was any judge-exchanged glances that seemed to contain far more information than most people could convey without words or gestures, and then turned back to him.

"Because you hate blacks," the one on the right said, as if that explained everything. Santee, he thought her name was. Her cape name, anyway.

"But..." he said, still feeling kind of lost. "You're black. Aren't you?"

Both girls shot him identical looks of fury, and for a second, his confusion seemed to recede—for a moment there, he was sure that they were going to attack him—but then they seemed to bring themselves under control.

"No," the one on the left—Congaree—said, her tone cold and the dark coffee skin of her face (what he could see of it, anyway) twisted into a scowl. "We are not black."

"Our skin might be black," Santee said, her tone brooking no denial, "but we are white. Whether you, or anybody else, likes it or not, we are white."

Kaiser shook his head in confusion.

"But-" he began. Then he stopped, shook his head again, and decided to try a new tack.

If only he could think of one. Black women asking to join a white supremacist organization was not something that happened every day, after all. And while he'd heard stories about how crazy the white power movement had gotten down south, he hadn't actually expected any of them to be true.

"What's the difference?" he finally asked, in lieu of voicing any of the hundreds of half-coherent questions racing through his mind. His tone, he knew, was probably only barely short of being plaintive, but given the circumstances, he thought that could be forgiven.

"The difference," Congaree spat, "is that we aren't some fucking halfwit moron assholes who thinks that everything and everybody ought to bend over backwards to pay for our fucking drug habit just because our ancestors came here from fucking Africa."

The way she said that last word made it very clear that it was among the most dire of curses, and her sister took up the explanation without missing a beat.

"The difference is that we're willing to work our asses off and beat the shit out of anybody who tries to stop us, if that's what it takes to get ahead in life," Congaree growled.

"The difference is that we don't think that you can't get anywhere without dealing fucking drugs or selling your body and becoming a fucking whore."

"The difference-" Santee began, before Kaiser held up his hand to stop the flow. This...this was starting to sound familiar. Very familiar, really. It still didn't make much sense, granted, but these...these were words he could agree with, even if nothing else was making sense.

"Got it," he said, simply. "So...why do you want to join the Empire? Why is it so important that we hate blacks?"

The two girls glanced at each other, again. Then one of them-Santee, he thought-reached down into the duffel bags they'd both brought out, and took two sheets of paper out. She glanced at them, and then stepped forward, and handed them to him.

Kaiser took the sheets, and glanced at them by sheer reflex. Then his eyes went wide, and he looked down, and read them more carefully.

"These are graduation certificates," he said, looking back up. "From Clemson, if I'm not mistaken."

Congaree nodded, not saying anything.

"Yours, I take it?" he asked.

Congaree nodded again.

Kaiser put the pages on his lap, and sat back.

"Why?" he asked, not even sure what he was asking.

"We wanted to get somewhere," Santee said. "To be someone. To stand up and be proud of what our mama did, of how hard she worked to get us out of the ghetto, and to let us be somebody, without out skin color entering into it. So we worked our asses off, and got into college, and got our degrees, and come back home, and you know what everybody said?"

"They said it didn't matter," Congaree said, taking up the narrative. "Said we'd probably earned our degree on our backs. That we was black, and that the college had a quota, and that we'd probably just got in because they didn't have enough black applicants."

"They said our momma was a fool," Santee spat. "Said she'd thrown away her life for nothing. Said we'd never be anything more than another pair of common whores."

"And when we didn't want to accept that," Congaree took up the tale, "some of the boys we grew up with? They got together to make us."

"And it ain't no different elsewhere," Santee said, her voice practically vibrating with fury. "It don't matter where you go, you find blacks, and they get pissed that you ain't black enough. That you ain't willing to live in the fucking ghetto, and pretend to be poor, because it makes them fucking well feel better about being too goddamn stupid or too goddamn lazy to get a real job and get the hell out of that place."

"And everybody and their fucking uncle is trying to tell us that we shouldn't try and fix the fucking system, or change our fucking lives, cause we too poor and too stupid to know any better. They just tell us that it's our fucking culture, and we should be proud of how we're different from the white folks around us, and how we should celebrate our fucking differences, cause 'differences are what make us special'. Well, fuck special. I want to know that my kids can get into college on their own fucking merits, not because there's a fucking quota to make sure people cut them a little extra slack. I wanna know that I can go—that my kids can go—whereever they fucking well want, without somebody trying to tell them that they're not smart enough, or not clever enough, or not...fuck, or not genetically gifted enough, to be able to do whatever the hell they want."

"And if some California or Massachusetts asshole university professor wants to say that we should just shut the fuck up and accept their 'help', then they go fuck themselves, and the horse they rode in on. Cause if white people can do it on they own, then there ain't no way in hell that we ain't smart enough to do it too."

"Our skin color don't define us," Congaree finished, her voice heated. "If we want to be white, we can be fucking white. White ain't just a skin color. It's a state of mind. Just like you don't have to be born Jewish, to be Jewish."

There was a long moment of silence in the room, before Crusader spoke up.

"I can respect that," he said.

The rest of the room turned to him, and he shrugged.

"What?" he said. "This country got to be the way it is because we does things a certain way. We don't do things like that because we're special, or because we're crazy, or anything like that. America is the way it is, because that because that's what works best. Most the immigrants to this country can accept that. I don't see why we should have to make exceptions for people who don't want to change. If they've got a better idea, we'll use it. Until then, they can fucking well assimilate."

As one, the two black women both favored Crusader with brilliant beaming smiles. Kaiser just sighed, and then cleared his throat.

The two turned their attention back to him.

"Two things," he said. "First of all, if you go out on patrol, you'll have to wear costumes that cover your skin until the grunts get used to you being on our side. Otherwise, they'll get confused, and I'm not in the habit of putting people in the kind of situation where friendly fire is a thing."

Both girls nodded, their expressions grave.

"We can do that," one—he'd already lost track of which one it was—said.

"Won't even mess with our costumes much," the other admitted. "We designed them that way when we started."

"Great. Second thing: Crusader is already married, so he's off the market. And believe me, if his wife finds out he's fooling around with you two, she will kill you both.

The two sisters gave him identical disappointed expressions, and then sighed in unison.

"Relax," Cricket said with a harsh-sounding laugh. "It's a big city. I'm sure you'll find somebody who you can get along with before too long."

God, Kaiser thought. What was the world coming to? Just when you thought you had a handle on things, Krieg sends a few people down South to make some contacts with some of the friendlier white supremacist groups down that way, and they come back with a pair of black white supremacists.

Francis Krouse:

Francis had already been having a rather crappy day, even before Marissa had called him.

To be fair to Marissa, the day going badly hadn't had anything to do with her. Rather, it had been going badly because Francis had to deal with Accord, and that was never a fun experience for anybody. Including Accord, which was fortunate, because if Accord was actually that sadistic or petty, Francis was pretty sure he would have had to kill the man.

But instead, Accord was simply an employer that tried to use them without actually having to come into contact with them, while he worked on finding a way to help Noelle. It wasn't his primary goal, Francis knew, but there were very few people smarter than Accord when it came to dealing with big, complex problems, and Francis could put up with a lot more bullshit than Accord dealt out when it came to helping Noelle. Or any of his friends, really. Even if, by now, most of them really would have preferred he stop helping them. But especially Noelle.

The problem was that Accord had admitted that he was nearing the end of his resources. He was having very little luck even figuring out what was happening to Noelle, let alone how to contain and control it—or, even better, how to turn it back. He had told Francis that there were one or two more things he could try, but he'd also warned that they were both rather extreme, and unlikely to bear fruit. To his credit, he'd seemed genuinely sorry, although whether that was because he regretted not being able to help, or because he regretted losing mercenaries of the caliber of Francis and his friends, Francis couldn't say.

So to have Marissa call him, and tell him that there was a situation with Noelle, just as he was getting more bad news from Accord...well, that was not a good day, to say the least. If for no other reason than the fact that Accord did not like it when things got messy, and if Noelle had escaped her watchers again, than things were guaranteed to have gotten messy.

Which, now that he was about to open the door to old bank, in whose vault Noelle was currently residing, seemed...odd. The buildings around here, while never the cleanest, seemed...remarkably intact, for one of Noelle's rampages.

Hmm.

Carefully, he opened the door.

Inside the old bank, there was a middle-aged man of average height and build, dressed in expensive and elegant clothing, seated on one of the old office chairs in the middle of the room. He was wearing what looked at first glance to be a necktie, but on second glance proved to be an ancient rope noose being worn like a tie. For some strange reason. Oh, and there was a sheathed sword leaning up against the chair. Judging by the wear patterns on the sword's grip, and the sheathe, both had seen no small amount of use, and Francis was willing to bet large amounts of money that he didn't have that the man was an excellent swordsman, who could probably puree most capes without difficulty.

Francis paused, on seeing this, and gave the man a quick once-over, before turning to the office/alcove by the door where Marissa liked to keep watch on things. She was leaning up against the wall, like usual, and simply nodded at him.

"Okay," he said, suddenly feeling tired of all this. "Aside from this bastard wandering into our hideout, what seems to be the problem?"

"He says that he can help Noelle," Marissa said, simply. "And he didn't wander in. He walked straight up, and knocked on the door. Like he knew exactly where we were."

Francis blinked, and shook his head.

"How?" he asked her.

"He wouldn't say. Said he'd only talk to you."

Francis blinked.

"And Noelle?"

"She was in the process of beating on the vault door when I called you," Marissa said. Then she lowered her voice even more, and stepped close to him, presumably so their visitor wouldn't hear her.

"She wasn't hitting it too hard," Marissa went on. "More like she's bored, than anything else. I think she's been more or less under control for a bit, now. But the door is still starting to come loose from the wall. Pretty sure she's going to get out, soon. Like, tonight, soon. Thank God she's stopped, for now, or I think she might be out already."

Francis sighed.

"Great," he murmured. "Just what I needed."

He shook his head, and then stepped out of the old office, and made his way towards the man in the chair, whose demeanor suggested nothing more than a vague amusement at the situation. Which was a neat trick, Francis had to admit, given who was currently surrounding him. If it was meant to unnerve people, well, it was certainly working.

"You said you had something to help Noelle," he said, after a moment spent studying the man. "What is it?"

The older man simply raised one eyebrow.

"And here I thought courtesy was dead," he said, his voice dry with irony. "How nice to see that the youth of today retain their manners."

Francis felt himself flush, and then rolled his eyes.

"Your pardon," he said, with over-exaggerated politeness. "It has been a very long day, and it isn't quite mid-afternoon yet, which means that it is likely to be a very long night as well. I would beg your forgiveness, but I fear that I am tired enough that it is likely that I will forget myself and be rude once more before this conversation is over."

"Quite all right," the older man said, waving one hand in the air in a dismissive gesture. "Although I would suggest that you work on improving that habit in the future. In the circles in which I work, unwarranted rudeness is not only not appreciated, but can be quite dangerous. Almost as much so as not being rude enough, sometimes."

He then raised an expectant eyebrow at Francis.

"Perhaps we should start again?" he said, his tone pointedly friendly.

Francis sighed.

"Sorry," he said, somewhat more sincerely. "I believe you wanted to speak with me? My name is Trickster. I'm the leader of the Travelers. As much as we have a leader, anyway."

"Quite," said the man, as he rose to his feet. "My name is...you may call me Nick, I suppose. Nick Scratch, if you must be formal. Please, though, not Nicky, or anything silly like that. I am quite fond of my name, and it would not do to see it demeaned by others. As for whether that is my correct name, well, no, it is not. But itwill do until we all know for sure what fruits today's negotiations may bring. As I suspect that you are likely to be quite busy in the near future, I will keep this brief.

"I represent...certain interests, I suppose you could say, on this plane of reality. The skill and proficiency of your group when it comes to resolving difficult and highly complex matters has come to our attention, as have your rather peculiar circumstances, and we would like to make you an offer.

One gloved hand reached into his jacket pocket, and withdrew two envelopes.

"One for you, and one for Miss Meinhardt," he said, taking a step to the side to lay the envelopes on what was left of the old tellers' counter. "Please do not mix them up. Correcting the mistakes that would cause would be...painful. Both to you, and to my patron."

Francis made no move towards the envelopes, neither directly, nor with his power.

"What are they?" he asked.

"Miss Meinhardt's envelope contains a possible cure for her condition," the man—Nick—said. "An ancient artifact that has been stolen from a semi-religious reliquary intent on keeping it away from people like yourselves, whom it could most benefit. It dates back to before the fall of the Roman Empire. Quite mystical, very mysterious. You know how it goes. Magic, mayhem, sorcery, and demons. Quite the droll affair, I'm sure, but for those who believe such things to be worth making a living at keeping them out of the so-called 'wrong hands', this artifact is considered to be quite significant. Sadly for the rest of us, we have other things to worry about in our lives. Still, my patrons and my allies have assured me that it will help her. At the very least, it will likely leave her better able to control herself, and for longer periods of time. At best, of course, it may cure her entirely, although I don't pretend to know how long that would take, save that a complete cure is unlikely to be instantaneous."

"And my own?"

"A set of instructions for how to find another such artifact, should you find yourself in need of such." the man told him. "One that is much more securely held, I am afraid. One whose owner does not wish to part with it, despite quite reasonable compensation being offered to him. Which is quite a shame, to be honest. My...patrons would prefer that we not be forced to resort to violence to obtain our ends, particularly not against one who is so well fortified as this individual, but that does not mean that we are prepared to be denied by some upstart young buck who happened to have gotten a lucky hit at the right time and the right place. No matter who he might be, or how he came to take said shot,"

He shook his head, then, his expression sad, before he sighed, and shrugged his shoulders.

"The sad truth is that there are always those prepared to judge us for where we have been," he said, "and for what conditions we have been forced to endure. Rather than what might lie beneath the surface of our actions, which might be a better indicator of what sorts of people we are. You know how it goes, I am sure. That is, I am afraid, a burden we have both had to share in our lives."

Francis nodded, slowly.

"And the price?" he asked.

"Two years," Nick said.

"Excuse me?"

"I rarely do, but in this case, I shall make an exception," his guest answered. "In exchange for your giving your girlfriend the coin held within that envelope, you and yours will work for me and my...patrons, for a period of two years. If at any point during those two years, you do not feel the rewards are worth the risks, or that your pay is not commensurate with your talents, you may leave with or without advanced notice, and claim your final bonus without prejudice."

"Our final bonus?" Krouse said, raising an eyebrow of his own.

In response, Nick simply nodded at the two envelopes.

Ah.

"And Noelle?"

"Will be free to leave with you at any time," came the answer. "Assuming you all wish it, of course. My patrons would not have you deprived of your free will, after all, and your service would hardly be willing if you were constrained to remain against your own desires."

Francis turned this over for several seconds.

"Sounds like the perfect deal," he said. "What's the catch?"

"The catch is that, as long as you did work for me, I would require your absolute obedience," the older man said. "Disobey me in any way—and I will know if you have disobeyed me—and I'll kill you all."

"And if your orders cannot be carried out as given?"

"As long as you achieve the overall objectives I have set, or you have a sufficiently good reason as to why you claim to be unable to do so, you will find me to be quite a forgiving master," the older man told him with a slight smile. "Mind you, I will be the ultimate judge of whether your reason was good enough, so I'm afraid failure would likely always be something of a risk, although I do not believe, and never will believe, in wasting assets without a very good reason. Of course, if it turns out that the cause of your inevitable failure was simply that you elected to go hunting outside the boundaries of your mission, whether for personal amusement, or for any other reason, I will be much less amenable. Not that I believe that you would do so, of course, but the issue seems to come up rather more often than I would prefer. Perils of the profession, I suppose."

He reached down, and picked up the sword in its sheath, and nodded to them.

"Do think about it," he said. "If you accept, than simply give the envelope to Miss Meinhardt, and I will be made aware of things quite shortly. Otherwise, you need only throw the envelope out, and we will never have to speak again."

Thomas Calvert:

The man who referred to himself as Coil was many things. Subtle, yes. Patient, yes. Well informed, naturally. Careful, of course. Manipulative...that could be argued either way. I mean, for an ordinary human, he was definitely quite manipulative, but for a Thinker, he would argue that he was no more than middle of the road, at best. Certainly, he was more straightforward than many of that ilk.

But above all else, he played the long game. Sure, he generally used his power to control the here and now—that's what it was best at, after all—but he always kept his end goal in mind, and had clear, concise steps to carry it out. None of this "conduct the dark ritual so that it is timed to align the six hedrons at exactly midnight on the night of the first new moon of the year" crap. Simple, direct, and always with a specific goal that would ultimately advance his plans for Brockton Bay.

At the end of the day, he had always felt, you didn't need muscle, or flight, or the ability to turn yourself into an iron ball of hate to defeat the other gangs. Or anything else the other capes always seemed to rely upon, really. All you needed was all you'd ever needed: planning, intelligence, and the ability to always make sure that every attempt you actually made was successful, and left no evidence behind.

At 11:43, he looked up from his computer, and canceled the second timeline, which he'd been using to go over various reports, and spun out a new one.

In one timeline, he picked up his cell phone, and sent a quick, pre-typed text to one of his agents in the Empire, and another to one of his agents in the PRT. Both men keyed in alerts, one far more formal than the other, and within minutes, reaction teams from each group were scrambling. With any luck, both groups should see this as a very rapid response to the sudden intrusion on their territories, and not look any further. Just in case they did, he turned to his computer, and hit a few more keys, to enter the pre-recorded calls into the PRT's database. With the correct time stamp, of course. No need to be sloppy, after all.

In the other, he sent another message, this time to a team of men who were waiting in parked vans near an old building, on the other side of which lay a small elementary school in Empire territory. The three men received the message, read its contents, and swung into action. One of them clicked the switch on the "dummy" bomb the van had been provided with, which supposedly would use several barrels filled with a mixture of diesel fuel, fertilizer, and some very unusually reactive Tinker-tech compounds to create a powerful blast capable of leveling the building, and doing considerable damage to the school on the other side, another turned and hit six keys in rapid succession to send the pre-packaged call to the school warning of an active bomb on the premises, and the third...turned, and triggered the activation timer on the specialized pack that the team had been told to use only to create a distraction in case capture seemed imminent.

The package immediately exploded, of course, setting off the bigger dummy bomb, and dropping the intervening building on top of the school. Which pretty much completely destroyed the school, and everybody in it.

Coil paused at that, and made a mental note to fire the third man, if he ended up sacrificing this timeline. I mean, it was good that the distraction had worked the way it was supposed to, but the bomb wasn't supposed to detonate until after emergency services had showed up, and the evacuation of the students had begun. And the man who was going to rule Brockton Bay had no use for men who couldn't follow orders.

Thirty minutes later, he sent a pre-arranged text to Tattletale in both timelines, to get her and her friends in motion.

Fifteen minutes after that, he collapsed the bomb timeline—it hadn't attracted as much attention from the capes as he'd wanted—and spun up a new one. In one timeline, he sent an anonymous tip to Carol Dallon, informing her that villains known as the Undersiders had been sighted on their way to Brockton Bay Central Bank. In the other, he sent the same text to the Wards, who were still in school at Arcadia. The second was riskier, he knew, since it was actually inside the PRT's systems, but it would roust them from class, and tie them down, and that was likely to be the important thing.

Panacea, he knew, would be at the BBCB to handle several issues that had come up over the past few weeks. Issues that had been carefully...manipulated...to all come up at once, obviously. Her family guarded her zealously, of course, and past experiences had shown that they would respond in force to anything that looked like even a potential attempted kidnapping of the most powerful healer in the eastern half of the United States. God help the Undersiders if they'd actually been there to kidnap the healer—the last group that had tried that, New Wave had tracked down and destroyed root and branch. Rumor had it that the group had actually struck a few deals with some minor villains to do so, despite Carol's long-standing and nigh-legendary hatred for anything even remotely villainous.

Either of those messages should ensure that no heroes were left to patrol the city, although it was unclear which would draw the most attention—the Wards departing en masse from school (and presumably dragging Glory Girl along with them), or the New Wave decamping en masse to lay siege to the bank.

Either way, in fifteen to twenty minutes, the timing should be just about right...

Carol Dallon:

Brandish looked up from her phone, and gave a grim smile to the people around her.

"Huh," she said. "I have just gotten an anonymous tip, telling me that nefarious villains were spotted passing through the intersection of Main and Christner Street, on their way to the Brockton Bay Central Bank. Headed there, no doubt, to do dastardly deeds upon various innocent civilians who just happened to be there going about their daily business."

She looked around at the ten others around her, before focusing in on the five who were mounted on Bitch's massive hellhounds.

"You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" she asked, her expression dangerously cheerful.

Grue sighed, and looked around them. Twenty feet away, the intersection of 2nd and Christner Streets, barely one block removed from Main Street, beckoned invitingly. Of course, first they'd have to get past the giant hardlight fence Shielder had erected across the road ahead of them, but...hey, man. Dreams are a wonderful thing. Even if they'll never happen.

"No idea," he said, his voice placid. "I haven't seen anybody who would fit that description since early this morning. Why do you ask?"

A/N: I went to college at right about the time when Dave Chapelle was still riding high, and I remember having one friend in particular show us some of his better skits from time to time. One of those skits involved a black white supremacist. Dave Chapelle played this for comedy...but everybody with me who was from the country, spent the entire skit waiting for the punchline.

We never got to it.

I suppose that the idea of a black white supremacist was supposed to be the punchline-after all, the concept seems absurd-but the problem is, black white supremacists are all too real, and they are disturbingly fanatical about their beliefs. If anything, they made the lifelong Klansmen where I grew up a little uncomfortable about how racist the black members seemed to be. These people are real. They are serious. And they believe in white supremacy with a passion and a fervor that white people like myself just can't wrap our minds around. Despite the fact that they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, white.

The worrying part is that they're starting to spread. When I left South Carolina, over twenty years ago, black white supremacists were a peculiarity of rural South Carolina. I now live in Richmond, Virginia...and I work with one occasionally. At least one part of the reasoning for Santee and Congaree wanting to join the Empire came from his explanation of why he doesn't mind working with more racist employers. Another part of it comes from a black kid that I used to know, and how many problems he had fighting his own way out of the ghetto. And there are more bits that came from other places. Frankly, a surprisingly large portion of the black population of America views people like Skidmark as representing everything that is wrong with America...and many of them feel that, if the government is not willing to wipe such drug gangs out, for whatever reason, than they should turn to those who are willing to do so. And right now, that means the white supremacists and their openly racist organizations. Too many blacks feel betrayed by the fact that American multi-culturalism is prepared to tolerate things like the drug-centered ghetto culture of the inner cities (their words, not mine), and feel that if anti-racism supports such notions, than perhaps racism isn't really so bad. Most of these people have never experienced that racism...but, disturbingly, some have.

In many ways, this facet of racism in America today is the ultimate proof that the war against blind racism has gained a tremendous amount of ground, and has worn the traditional forms of racism down until they are both much less prominent, and much less pervasive. But as the bite of more traditional forms of racism has eased, it becomes more difficult to easily determine what behavior, exactly, is racist...and that means that the crusade against racism runs the risk of becoming more and more of a political tool, rather than a genuine cause to which all intelligent people should dedicate themselves at least in part. And as that latter assumption spreads, milder forms of racism become more widespread on both sides of the aisle, meaning that racism as a whole becomes that much harder to finally wipe out. Ultimately, of course, a person's race or skin color matters about as much as the color of their hair or their eyes. It is something that can be given in a description, or noted in a picture, but nothing more. Just like a person having blonde, or even blue, hair, it ultimately matters not one jot (except when it comes to fashion, since the color of your complexion affects what color clothing you can wear). But as long as people try to pretend it does matter, for any reason...well. I'm sure you can all imagine what that means in the long term.

What's worse, part of that long term is already here: the increasing isolationism of black communities in this country, and a spreading belief in colleges and universities that black poverty in America, or elsewhere, is the result of something like genetics, are two signs of racism's resurgence. There are others, which I will not mention here, either because I do not understand them, or because I simply do not know enough to have noticed them. But the signs are there. And, disturbingly, aside from a handful of "ignorant" rednecks, they are largely being ignored.

I cannot emphasize this enough: you cannot assume that racism is something that persists only in poor, uneducated whites living in the back country of America. Over the past forty years, it has shifted, mutated, adapted, and changed, until it has become something very different today than it was in the past. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the changing face of white supremacy in America.