(Jewish Group) Kanye, Kyrie, and Me
RONNIE LEE REFUSED to eat pork. “Swine,” he said, “was unclean.”
My oldest cousin was never particularly religious. In fact, the only time I ever recall Ronnie Lee in the pews of a church was for various family funerals and weddings, where he often came dressed to the nines with high-shined Stacy Adams and silk-brimmed, fedora hat festooned with a peacock feather like he was headed to a Player’s Club ball. Once, days after somebody plastered his backside with a hail of buckshots in a botched robbery, he came hobbling into Auntie Gerald’s house looking for a hot plate and a warm bed. We never knew who was actually the victim, as Ronnie Lee was sometimes the one doing the robbing. Between the women, drugs and stints in prison, he managed to sire 11 or 12 children by last count.
Undereducated and prone to conspiracy theories, when he had a bit of liquor in him, he’d rail about “staged” moon landings and the scourge of Reagan-era trickle-down economics from the front porch. He was right about Reagan, but he thought Jewish people controlled everything from the World Bank to The Great Ethiopian Famine. For him, Jew was a verb most often used to describe negotiating a price, cheating a customer or high interest predatory loans. “They got too much power,” he’d say. “We’s the lost tribes of Israel.”
Through the years, he was so drunk so often that a judge in Georgia made him turn over the license plates to his truck. His mama, my auntie, loved him bone-deep even if she thought his worldview was poppycock. “Get on ‘way from here with that noise, Ronnie Lee,” she’d say.
Ronnie Lee was just that crazy uncle that needed to be suffered if not pitied. After refusing COVID-19 vaccinations, he passed on a few years ago with his children at his side. But the deeply rooted antisemitism he harbored throughout his adult life lives on.
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