On Martin Luther King Day, plenty of preachers and protesters lamented that we as a nation seem to be going backwards. Racism, which never went away but was at least purged from the public sphere, has now been legitimized as a way to express perceived victimhood. Membership in racist hate groups is rising steadily, and since 9/11, more Americans have been killed by racial hate crimes than by radical Jihadist terrorists.
How sad that this year’s King holiday fell in the middle of a pitiful debate over whether the President of the United States called Haiti and African nations “s***hole” or “s***house” countries, as if one is any more acceptable than the other. How lamentable that some public figures are actually dismissing, or worse, defending this characterization on the grounds that many prior presidents also used foul language (That is not the point!), or that this President is just talking the way his supporters talk in private (So the president is only a reflector of society and not a leader?), or that he was actually speaking the truth about the economic misery some nations find themselves in (due to decades of oppression in the global economy that our nation has supported), or that his careless language doesn’t matter so long as good policy results. (The end justifies any means, in other words.)
But to indignantly call the President of the United States a racist, while painfully obvious, is not really helpful. In truth, we are all racists. We are not all equally racist, but we’ve all been shaped in powerful ways by the narrative of “race” that has informed our nation’s history. In reality, there is only one human race, but for the last 600 years, beginning with European colonization of black and brown people, the myth of different human races has been used to justify the supremacy of “white” people and the subjugation of “dark-skinned” people. It is impossible not to be infected by the sin of racism, even in subtle ways that escape our personal awareness. To accuse the President of racism risks the implication that those leveling the charge are completely free of racism themselves, which is simply not true.
