Over the past 5 years or so I have been confronted with a growing challenge. I find it harder and harder not giving in to hatred. I try my best to live up to the high standard espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he said, “I will allow no man to bring me so low as to hate.” I seek to emulate the gentle example set by Fred Rogers of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” renown. But this is becoming so difficult for me to do in face of the growing virulent, destructive racist hatred in so many of my fellow white people. This is especially maddening as I see it to be true in many, if not most, of the evangelical “Christian” community of which I used to be a part. They loudly cry how they are not racist yet they were a deciding factor in electing a president who was endorsed by leaders of poisonous white supremacist groups. They continue to applaud and support this man who appealed to a violent white supremacist hate group to “stand by” as he approached the time of seeing the confirmation of his legitimate defeat in his bid for reelection. He incited an attempted insurrection of this nation by his words and actions following that confirmation.
Let me be as clear as I possibly can here. If you claim that you are not racist but you support racist politicians, policies, and practices, then you are, in effect, a racist. You support destructive, dehumanizing, discrimination that will negatively impact all people, yourself included.
I believe that those reading this fall into one of two categories.
One category will be those close-minded people who will not change their minds regardless of what factual evidence they are confronted with showing the reality of the continuing presence of pervasive racism in our nation and in their lives. They do not suffer from a lack of knowledge. They suffer from a twisted spirit that can approve the mistreatment of a fellow human being and believe there is either no mistreatment being perpetrated or that it is justified from some warped logic. They form the group who provides me the opportunity to practice not giving people the power to bring me so low as to hate. I will not waste my time trying to convince them of the error of their ways. Rather, I will seek to relegate them to a powerless position of irrelevance.
If you claim that you are not racist but you support racist politicians, policies, and practices, then you are, in effect, a racist.
The second category would be that of the open-minded person. This category can be further broken into two groups. However, both of these groups embrace a willingness to change because they possess an admirable ability to admit their error in the light of more accurate information.
One group holds racist beliefs but they are beginning to question the validity of facts they have been taught as historical, sociological, and scientific truth. They read and hear things that are causing them to think, “What if those things I have been taught either ignore, leave out, or lie?”
The other group would be that in which I have found myself since I opened my mind and heart and made a shift in my perspective. This group recognizes that it has made a proper shift by adopting a proper anti-racist stance.
However, the danger which must be guarded against in doing this is being lulled into a false sense of satisfaction. Simply adopting a proper attitude of anti-racism does not do anything to substantively reduce the reality of destructive racism.
This is a good start. But it is only that, a start. We must continue to seek out and eradicate racist ideas and practices in our lives. We must speak out against racist attitudes and practices when we encounter them in the course of our day to day lives. We must seek ways to find and support those who can on local, state, and national levels influence and enact policies and laws that will truly lift up and insure that we are a nation that believes all people are created equal.
Think about it.
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