The scene from O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?— a comedy— depicts a Ku Klux Klan gathering where a black man will be lynched— in a base and brutal attempt to “preserve” the backward “cultural heritage” of racism. Such events occurred in the United States with regularity as recently as the 1950’s. You may be thinking to yourself that was nearly sixty years ago; things have changed. You would be wrong.
ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 20, 1981— Henry Hays and James Knowles drove around Mobile, Alabama looking for someone to murder. They spotted nineteen year old Michael Donald, a young black man, walking to his home. They attacked him, beating him with a tree limb; later, they slit his throat, and hung him from a tree across the street from his home.
1981.
On June 7th, 1998, racist John William King and two other animals masquerading as human beings, came upon James Byrd Jr. walking along Martin Luther King Drive in Jasper, Texas. They used a chain and a pickup truck to drag forty-nine year old Byrd by the waist for approximately three miles on a stretch of remote backwoods pavement. Pieces of James Byrd were found in seventy-five locations along the crime scene route.
1998.
The 2008 presidential contest produced only a cursory national examination of the hatred and racial bigotry that exists in the United States; it is an ugly reality that will continue to be carefully exploited for political gain in the months— AND YEARS— to come. On the comment sections of blogs and other places, like youtube, you may find racial epithets so stupid, so vile, one must wonder how the person managed to learn the rudimentary computer skills to post it in the first place.
In the very face of such darkness we are approaching a moral crossroads in America. The more open racism dares to become, whether it be manifested verbally or is written, or as acts of terror and murder— the more necessary it becomes to expose it to the light of spiritual idealism— a light strong enough to burn away the dross of stupidity and fear which nurtures racism in the mind of man.
As the possibility of electing a man of black and white heritage becomes increasingly likely, we can no longer afford to tolerate even the appearance of the vestigial slime of the animal mind of fear that produces racism. Progressive, intelligent Americans should instinctively know that all men and women are brothers and sisters of one human race. The backward and retarded immorality of fear and racism must undergo a type of radical moral surgery that will excise it from the minds of our species, once and for all.
As the political punches start to fall faster and more directly, let us insist as Americans dedicated to liberty and freedom of expression, that we do so in the spirit of a new understanding of politics and society, one that respects all human beings equally, one that honors the highest values of the human mind. Perhaps at long last, the time has come to make a leap forward in cultural growth and understanding, a leap that can collectively take us to a new plateau of appreciation of what we can achieve— personally and collectively— if we sacredly commit to the highest moral and ethical values we can know.
That plateau is human brotherhood.
Thanks for this. It’s been a drag to see how racism continues to be a constant reminder of how backward we really are as a nation when it comes to supposedly loving our neighbors as ourselves in this so-called Christian nation. When will we learn?