Jessica Black doesn’t see anything wrong with dressing up her 7-year-old son as a KKK wizard for Halloween. When faced with backlash from the media after a picture of her son surfaced, she scoffed at the idea she was a poor parent by citing the KKK costume as a “family tradition,” with the woman’s older brother having worn the same in kindergarten and at age 13.
“My brother has [worn it] when he was in kindergarten and when he was 13,” said Black.
She is fine with the KKK and believes in their vision of race separation. “It’s supposed to be white with white, black with black, man with woman, and all of that. That’s what the KKK stands for,” she explained.
Certainly she is entitled to her opinion, but that her impressionable children are being imprinted on it at such a young age makes the rest of us wonder how fair it is for the mother to “raise her kids her own way,” and let them celebrate holidays dressed as members of one of America’s most notorious hate groups. Naturally people across America are concerned.
“The fact of the matter is that this even could have happened anywhere in the US and you all being more outraged that your own has a bad name than the actual issue at hand is extremely disappointing,” said one woman, as reported in the Huffington Post. But nevertheless, it takes a village to raise a child, and there are many places this likely would not happen. That it happened in Jackson Virginia, where there is an active KKK group is no coincidence.
Yet the enclosing nature of the media, the internet, and Twitter, allows the nation as a whole to comment at the outgrowths of hate in isolated places. It is hoped nevertheless that the boy is neither stigmatized nor imprinted by the costume.
Image Source: WHSV