White Supremacists Reveal Content of their Character

06.20.2021 ________________________________________

Yet another white supremacist — Newt Gingrich — has emerged to hector New Hampshire about what it should think about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and systemic racism by misappropriating MLK’s “… dream of a nation in which people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character …”

Today, we know well the content of Gingrich’s character.

Desperate to stay bonded to America’s original sins of slavery and genocide of Indigenous peoples, Gingrich, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, among others in our state, has disseminated, across multiple media platforms, white supremacist ideology to keep Americans from learning an unexpurgated American history from its 1619 origins alongside the dominant white 1776 narrative.”

Today, we know well the content of their character.

Espousing a form of anti-American excrescence entitled “1776 Action” — Gingrich and fellow travelers falsely assert: “Critical Race Theory-based curriculum, which pits students against one another on the basis of race, is being forced on students all across America. It rejects the central message of our founders as well as Martin Luther King Jr. — that we are all individuals created equal in the image of God — and it’s taking our country backwards.”

Whoever utters such calumnies are either ignorant beyond redemption or, more likely, unreconstructed white apologists looking to conceal the truth of systemic racism and its pernicious effects on people of color and minority communities.

While it’s true, as Gingrich says, that “America is a better place today because great leaders like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. chose to embrace the premise, and the promise, of America …” it is equally true that in spite of generations of promises America’s failed many of them.

It’s equally true that many Americans — like MLK, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X — were harassed, spied upon, and assassinated fighting for respect, dignity, and rights promised to them in the Declaration of Independence so highly valued by HB 544’s proponents.

It’s not just about the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1882 Chinese Expulsion Act, the over 4,400 lynchings, the 1921 Tulsa pogrom, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” the 1939 refusal to allow the SS St. Louis to disembark 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, the internment of Japanese-Americans – about Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, George Floyd – it’s about contextualizing American history; about persistent racial exploitation and trauma and their disproportionate effects on generational health and wealth.

When Commissioner Edelblut says that proposed state legislation “will help instill confidence in parents that our basic values are not being compromised,” which values is he touting?  The values of the last state to have a paid holiday honoring MLK or the values of a just people committed to truth and human dignity?

It is not true that CRT teaches children that one race is superior to another and to assert such is dishonest, provocative and dangerous.

It is true, as Edelblut notes, that Ibram X. Kendi wrote that “… [t]he only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination … The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” but Edulblut fails to allow Kendi to define what he means.

Kendi continues: “… As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, ‘You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.’ As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, ‘In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.’ ”

Buried in the budget bill because it can’t pass on its own, it may be moot whether this illegitimate calumny passes, whether a politically-ambitious governor signs it or not.

Those who favor whitewashing history — favor suppressing the grievances and rights of Americans unlike themselves – favor suppressing the franchise of citizens who don’t look like them – have shown they’ll lie, go to any lengths, propose any laws, to protect their privilege and power over others.  Most repugnant are those who distort, decontextualize, and misrepresent truth-tellers like MLK and Kendi when they talk about race and oppression. 

Today, we know who they are.

That such a coven of mendacious white men — who arrogantly assume they’ve a right to speak for both oppressor and oppressed — is so willing to reveal such bias is not only repugnant but anti-American, contrary not only to Granite State values but contrary to universal values of social justice, freedom, equity, equal rights and human dignity.

Today, we know them well.

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Happy Father’s Day!
When I was 15 I had a summer job at the shoe shop where my father worked – this Is one of my earliest photos !