Denounce divisive race-baiting
After an election season marked by hate, time to dialogue, listen
Americans voted Tuesday in one of the most anticipated midterm elections in recent memory, preceded by months of tensions, anxiety and a spike in hate crimes that threatened to tear apart the social fabric of our country. No matter the outcome of the elections, there are certain, fundamental actions that must now be taken to stem the tide of white supremacy and move toward a pluralistic society in which we recognize our differences and see them as enhancing who we are, not as a threat.
The first thing we must do is to call on all our political leaders, especially those on the right, to unequivocally denounce the calculated racebaiting and fear-mongering led by President Trump that manifested in the recent hate crimes and attempted bombings, including the Oct. 27 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people, as well as the murder of two black people at a Kentucky grocery store three days earlier — both carried out by avowed racists.
Those attacks, along with the killing of Heather Heyer last year in Charlottesville, Va., by a white supremacist, are the outcomes of weaponized hate deployed by the political elite — intentionally and strategically — to increase fear and deepen divisions for political gain.
Calling out white supremacy and hate is not about being a Democrat or a Republican. It’s about the soul of our country and who we are as a people. It’s about reclaiming our democracy and resisting our shift toward authoritarianism. Instead we must give voice to what Abraham Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom,” in his call to our better angels.
In refusing to denounce white supremacy, but instead renewing attacks against the media and vulnerable immigrants even after the horrific killings, Trump is deliberately roiling his base, increasing their levels of fear, and radicalizing them to a point where they react with organized violence. Even when a group of rabbis demanded Trump denounce white supremacy before visiting Pittsburgh in the wake of the killings, he refused.
This is strategic, not coincidental. What impelled the synagogue shooter to carry out the heinous murders was not a sense of anti-Semitism alone. The members of the synagogue were actively involved in providing support for another racialized and demonized group: the immigrants en route to the U.S.-Mexico border from Honduras and El Salvador whom the shooter had described as “invaders,” mimicking language used by Trump. Trump took it a step further when he claimed last month, without any evidence, that the caravan was carrying “unknown Middle Easterners,” a clear allusion to terrorism.
The compounding of hatred for these different groups that were connected through an elaborate, yet fictionalized, conspiracy to hurt America was a recipe for the massacre in Pittsburgh. Then, showing no signs of repentance, Trump unveiled an anti-immigration campaign ad just days after the synagogue attack, an ad so grotesque that even Fox News announced it would no longer run it.
Trump and the hardliners in his party want the public to be afraid. They want people to be divided. They want us to live under constant stress and erode any fragments of civic trust we have in each other and with our neighbors. Trust that is necessary for our democracy. Our response must be to refuse to play into the hands of the political strategists who are mainstreaming hate, who are turning neighbor against neighbor, and who are stoking racial anxiety to dangerous levels for their own personal gain.
With the elections over, we now have an obligation to take step back and engage in a national conversation about the direction in which we are heading. We can set aside a day and time for dialogue in a structured manner, at locations across the country, through our institutions, in our schools, universities, workplaces, places of worship and community centers. There we can take a deep examination of our social crises that have been unfolding, our eroding democracy, and whether or not our trajectory as a country matches up to core values of love and humanity many of us hold. We need to ask ourselves about our collective aspirations as a country despite shortcomings and disappointments.
Such a conversation would provide us with an opportunity to bridge with one another, at both an individual and institutional level, and to hear other people’s perspectives as our citizenship requires of us.
As an African American whose parents were sharecroppers, I know how it feels to be ignored, mistreated, and disrespected. But that doesn’t excuse violence or hatred toward other groups. And despite the spread of weaponized hate, we don’t have the option of quitting or giving up. We owe this to those who came before us and to those who will come after us. We owe this to each other and to ourselves. Dialogue alone is insufficient to heal our wounds of the past and unite as a country. But dialogue with the courage to listen is a start.