♫ Then they let their hair hang down Remember when after Obama’s election, pundits insisted we were living in a “post-racial” society? “America’s struggle is to become not post-racial, but post-racist,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote years later. On the far right, “post-racial” was a prime, MAD magazine example of “What They Say and What it Really Means.” What some white people really meant was it was time for Black people to STFU about their treatment in white, by-God America. It was wishful thinking. At best. ‘Cause when they get behind closed doors, Charlie Rich might have sung, they still let their hair hang down. In Oklahoma, for example (The Oklahoman): In southeast Oklahoma, the sheriff of McCurtain County, one of his investigators and a county commissioner are accused by a newspaper of discussing killing a local reporter and lamenting that modern justice no longer includes hanging Black people. The explosive accusations were published this week in the McCurtain Gazette-News. According to the newspaper, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, investigator Alicia Manning and District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings were part of an impromptu discussion after the March 6 meeting of the county Board of Commissioners. Bruce Willingham, the Gazette’s publisher, had left a voice-activated recorder in the meeting room. He suspected that officials meant to conduct official business after the meeting ended in violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act. The Oklahoman states that it “could not identify who the speakers were in the recordings.” “I talked on two different occasions to our attorneys to…