Racism is the deadliest weapon

It is 11 days since the massacre in El Paso and 10 days since the Dayton carnage, two preventable tragedies that have been on the minds of many. Some clarifying thoughts:

First, this is not about guns. Guns are for hunting, self-protection and robbing banks. Weapons are for overthrowing governments and indiscriminate slaughter. Assault weapons are weapons of mass destruction. They are not guns.

Second, this is about us, the 80 percent of the population comfortably under bell curves, the people who fit the 150 year old sentiment that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

Third, this is about what we mean by “we” as in “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (Declaration of Independence); “We the People of the United States” (preamble to Constitution); and “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one,” Great Seal of the United States, 1782).

Fourth, this is about history, meaning it is about hopes, ideals and myths as much as facts. It is about what we want to believe more than it is about any facts of what has actually happened since the first Europeans created Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

Fifth, this is about race, as in white nationalism.

This all adds up to facing the choice that we can work toward a democracy, a democratic society with a republican form of government, or we can tolerate white supremacy in our midst, but we cannot have both. White nationalists are defined by “the other” that they are not: brown, black, red or yellow. Supremacy means they know they are inherently superior, a physical fact based on their skin color, a fact requiring others’ deaths.

People are allowed to believe that. Any of us can believe the earth is flat or 10,000 years old or that whites are the superior race, but now is the time for the rest of us to stand up to ideologues with racist fantasies and say NO. No, that is not the ideal of the country I live in nor the potential it has to become.

The truest, most historic American project has been toward an expansion of “we” in struggles against those insisting “we” meant only them and those that they defined as citizens and voters, a very narrow slice of society in 1776 and as recently as 1965, when the Voting Rights Act passed.

The inconvenient truth is not that there are racists in our community, in every community. No, the inconvenient truth is our acceptance of racists. Who wants to truly hear what is being said? Who wants to stand up against what is truly being said? What is truly being said is believed by those who say it. Facing that fact means facing them.

The path toward democracy leads through confronting racist statements.

We know so little and deny so much. Before there was a Republic of Texas that land was Mexico’s. Before there was a California, the Mexican border in the Pacific Northwest butted up with the Oregon Territory.

The true history of our country is that we have been a racist, genocidal culture. We have expanded through conquest. Those white supremacists are as American as apple pie. H. Rap Brown spoke truth when he called violence as American as cherry pie.

This is our actual history.

Count on it.