Someone suggested to me that it would be more effective for a nonmember of SDARJ to write a letter condemning the hate crime that recently occurred at the home of Charlotte King, the head of SDARJ. There is a reason members of SDARJ chose to be members: It is our profound and shared longing that racial justice become a norm in our country, not the aberration it is now and always has been. Speaking as a white member, it is also a desire to continually confront my own white privilege, to learn to advocate, stand up, be brave, to resist the forces of hate and fear and cowardice that rip our country into pieces and now threaten our democracy.
So I will write, because it is, for me, the best tool I have for advocating for and supporting Charlotte and every other Black person in our nation, and standing up against these forces of hate. In the Cape Gazette article about the hate crime, Charlotte referred to the perpetrator as a coward. Indeed! Even if the word were written in daylight, it was written with a chemical that wouldn’t reveal itself immediately, giving the coward ample time to slink back into the cracks. Most hate crimes are committed in the dark, or behind masks or hoods, or, so often these days, behind a gun or with the protection of a mob, high on mob mentality, social media hate-stoking, and the physical rush of a moment of feeling powerful.
It’s that word powerful that I come back to. Way, way back in our history, working and poor Blacks and whites banded together to do something about the power structure keeping them down. The white elites realized such a banding together created a formidable danger for them, and so they invited the poor and working whites to join with them in their whiteness, promising that because they were white, they would always and forever be better than the Black people. And the white folks did just that. It didn’t matter that they received no benefits from severing that joint effort with their Black brothers and sisters; it didn’t matter that their lives didn’t improve. All that mattered was that they were better than those others and they now had someone to kick around, vent their anger and despair and frustration on.
Why must we register our sense of power only as power over? Why can’t power be shared? Why can’t we look at others as equal members of the human community without the need to place ourselves in the center or above? What are we so afraid of? Cowards are afraid; cowards are weak. Not strong. The violence of hate crimes expresses fear and weakness, not bravery and strength. We must ask ourselves why it is, as statistics have shown, that the number of hate crimes has increased over the past several years. Why are we moving in the wrong direction?
I call on everyone to have the courage to come out from the shadows and to meet one another, to listen to each other’s stories, to take the chance to understand one another, our differences and our similarities, to listen. I call on everyone to drop the weapons of hate and fear, to repudiate the messages of division, to stand up for racial justice, and work together toward the best of our democratic vision.
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