I was a white kid who grew up in the mostly segregated inner city of St. Louis, MO in the 1980s. I attended predominantly African-American schools as part of the desegregtion program. Most of my teachers, counselors, coaches and mentors were black. They brought with them a life experience that would influence how I viewed myself and our country.
With this frame of reference, I, now as a grown white man, have to call out what the Republican party is doing with their war on Critical Race Theory and their attempts to white-wash this nation’s racial history.
Of course, most of the cult members in today’s GQP couldn’t tell you what CRT is or where and how it is taught. They couldn’t care less. That’s not the point. The point is to animate the racial grievances among the white electorate. It is a craven ploy to gain power, and along with racial gerrymandering and the “big lie”, to cement that power forever. They want a kind of American apartheid, where the predominantly white, rural minority rules.
The goal of these nefarious forces, going back to the founding of our country and before, has always been to solidy white supremacy and silence those that disagree with them. Whether it be the Three-fifths Compromise of 1787 at the Consitutional Convention, the insitution of slavery itself, the Civil War, the founding of the KKK, the system of Jim Crow segregation and the violent response to preserve it, or the end of the “Solid South” after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there are plenty of examples of these forces at work.
And throughout all of the history just mentioned, what did these forces use to menace and control black people? Lynchings. We even have examples of the hangman’s noose in our recent history. How can we forget the gallows erected outside the Capitol during the insurrection of 1/6/21? It’s no accident that a violent white mob whose goal was to maintain power chose that bit of imagery.
And on it goes with these Republicans. They call themselves patriots. They call themselves Christians. They call themselves the “real Americans”. We have heard this before from these people. The Republican party of today embraces and embodies all of the ugliness of the past. Instead of a noose, they will use lies. Instead of a noose, they will pack the courts. Instead of a noose, they will racially gerrymander Congressional districts. Instead of a noose, they will elect Secretaries of State and state legislators who will overturn elections. And, instead of a noose, they will use issues like CRT to play on the fears and prejudices of white people to secure power. The Republican cult can only survive on division.
I wish more white folk had experienced my upbringing in St. Louis; what it was like to go to a poor inner city school. How, even though we were all poor, I was treated differently outside of those school walls as compared to my black classmates. How I was given the benefit of the doubt by bus drivers, business people, and police, and they were not. The attitudes of so many whites might be different if they had witnessed what I had, and seen the truth of racial inequality for themselves.
But, that is just a dream. This is our reality. All of these Republican schemes add up to a 21st century lynching meant to make uppity blacks shut the fuck up and render ALL black folk invisible. And, if they succeed, I do not see how this nation survives.