Will America Ever Be Honest With Itself?

I remember when The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did a segment on racism. Most of the whites they talked to believed that there was no longer any significant racism in America while the blacks overwhelmingly said the opposite. We should note here that when racism does occur in America, whites are usually the guilty culprits while blacks and others are most often the victims.

Itzbeth Menjívar (click here for a short bio) has written a short but worthwhile article on racism, sexism, and other stuff. in America for the Sojourners website. She introduces the article by commenting on Trump's latest racist tweets and the support he gets from his followers (click here for the article). She confirms how Trump's tweets telling certain congresswomen to go back to their own nations is racist--which it is by EEOC standards. She goes on to comment on how men have forever been telling women how they should behave. In the end, there are many times women are not treated as being equals to men.

After that, Menjívar mentions the legitimate social issues that the congresswomen who were tweeted against by Trump are working on. Then she shifts here attention to us by citing a portion of Martin Luther King's Jr. Letter From A Birmingham jail. In that cited portion, King talks about the biggest obstacle to progress for Blacks: white moderates. What bother King about white moderates is their non-committal attitude to achieving progress for Blacks. For what many  such whites were saying is that while they agreed with King's goals, they opposed his methods. From that, King saw that such moderates were more interested in the comfort brought by an order that was without justice than in justice. Their first concern was their own comfort. Their second concern was to come off as being concerned for the welfare of blacks. And that brings us back to racism in America. For in opposing King's nonviolent direct methods of protest, what these white moderates were demonstrating was that they were promoting racism by preferring order to justice.

There are many ways by which racism appears in America. Not all of its forms are equally ugly. King saw that one of the least ugly, if ugly at all, form of racism was also the most devastating to his cause. And this was one of the points of Menjívar's article.

Nothing more will be commented on here because more attention should be paid to the article by Menjívar than this article that is commenting on it. Her article is short and to the point and should be read and shared.