If this is your heritage, your heritage is hateful.
Early Thursday morning, at least four Confederate flags were
placed around Atlanta's Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, home of Dr. Martin Luther King and one of the most important monuments to the civil rights movement in the nation. Early reports are that two people have been seen on surveillance video.
This is not a joke.
It isn't funny.
It's a provocative act of hate designed to intimidate not only the thousands who call Ebenezer home, but to Atlanta's larger African-American community. Beyond the reality that someone was brazen enough to go into a black community and do this in the middle of the night, it is a stark sign of where we are as a nation. Whatever was underneath the surface, deeply embedded in the hearts of many, is now bubbling up from coast to coast.
While people have claimed that this flag is not about hate, time and time and time again, hate tells on itself. This flag, those who it represented historically, and those who love it now, are racist.
And, to be clear, racism is dangerous. It is the fundamental devaluing of human beings because of the color of their skin. When you devalue people, or even when a government allows a people group to be devalued, it's only a matter of time before intimidation and violence follow.
It is heartbreaking that this is our reality, but here we are nonetheless.
America. 2015.