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04.25.2021 ________________________________________

I am so tired of white supremacists and their sympathizers trying to appropriate the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – himself once targeted by the FBI as the most dangerous man in America – to justify their embrace of white supremacist theology by using select MLK quotes out of context. Seeking to justify their denial of the existence of structural racism in order to keep the Other – primarily people of color and immigrants – out of America’s Public Square, they go on ad infinitum about the content of character being more important than the color of skin, totally misappropriating King and his humanity.

Judging them by the color of their skin. 

As Ramadan began I took a week off to enter into the month of prayer and sacrifice by trying to put behind me – at least temporality – reminders of bigotry and hate that daily infect our lives and corrupt the Public Square.

Today, as I return, those reminders are still everywhere. 

In Eaton NH a homeowner daily flaunts their ignorance and bigotry in public by flying the Confederate flag from their property.

In Etna NH a successful entrepreneur – reflecting his lifetime of white privilege with an Ivy league MBA and career in private equity, argues in favor of HB 544 – which seeks to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) – because wants to send his kids “to a school free from racism, discrimination, and racial stereotyping.”

Heaven forbid that his children – in school – learn to challenge the privilege that their father wants to protect – privilege which has accrued to white Americans over a period of 400 years – privilege built on stolen land enriched by enslaved labor – wealth gathered to the exclusion of others – that persists to this very day.

Heaven forbid he should express such sympathies for schoolchildren in Detroit who are told there is no constitutional right to literacy; or for lead-poisoned schoolchildren in Flint; or for schoolchildren who hang around fast food franchises to access WiFi in order to complete their homework.

Heaven forbid that the privilege that benefits white elites and the white working class should be challenged – heaven forbid that the truth be published, be told, about America’s foundational sins and their legacy.

This isn’t about obsessing over the sins of the past – it’s recognizing that such sins continue to be committed – recognizing that a country that continues to suppress the franchise of minorities and peoples of color has yet to fulfill America’s aspirational promises.

Those reminders are everywhere.

During that first week of Ramadan I received a frightening email from a person making only the most cursory attempt to hide his identity asking me if I can define “the difference between a Black man and a n****r.”

I was stunned: If a person feels free enough – protected enough – to be so confrontational, is nothing off-limits to racists?

Those reminders are everywhere – my world is not Mr. Roger’s neighborhood.

In Newmarket a Confederate flag flies in a  cul-de-sac – in Stratham worshippers must pass a QAnon sign in order to worship at a nearby church – and recently, as reported in the nhjournal, state rep Ken Weyler of Kingston said he considered CRT to be a “Marxist, anti-American, anti-White” program.

CRT, which recognizes that systemic racism is an ongoing part of American life, challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish and attempts to develop tools through which to analyze and confront racism.

A systemic racism that celebrates racists like Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, that embraces ‘replacement theory,” that calls Mexicans rapists and criminals.

Those are not the sins of the past.

Racism is an everyday experience for most people of color. It’s not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that reach across America – across our neighborhoods –  from dealing with the police, to being food-insecure, to being disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

To confront such inequities we not only need a revolution in our priorities and a re-evaluation of our values; we need to mobilize ourselves to understand that what’s in the past is in the present, that justice is not color-blind, that being created equal does not mean equal opportunity – that to realize all that takes work, humility, and an open mind.

In today’s political climate such work is a challenge yet has new urgency. People are calling for, and dying for, an examination of systemic racism from its roots – in 1619, when the first slave ship arrived at Jamestown Colony – to the streets of Tulsa, Watts, Ferguson, Minneapolis – to the Hennepin County Government Center where George Floyd’s murderer was convicted.

Critics of such research don’t have to agree with it: they must read it, as they must read Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,) Kimberlé Crenshaw (Critical Race Theory,) and Ibram X Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning.)

But they won’t.

If only they were lazy, there might be a way to reach them. It’s not that. They’re not interested in the truth, not interested in being liberated from the burden of sins that have too long afflicted America and limited the fulfillment of a promise that all people are created equal.

“I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas,” Kendi writes. “ But if there is anything I have learned during my research it’s that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or history book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place.”

That’s what frightens me the most.